“If You Can Count to One...”

One of the unfortunate traits I believe I have passed on to my children is my almost complete lack of comprehension when it comes to numbers—numbers of all kinds.

Show me a sheet of numbers and it’s like looking at a page written in Chinese. This has caused me problems over the years, especially in my days as a publishing executive where one of my principal duties was to explain and interpret financial data to an inquisitive and over-involved board of directors. However, somehow I’ve been able to muddle through, and so have my kids.

Like everything else these days, there’s a name for my problem. I am innumerant. As defined on Wikipedia, numeracy is a proficiency that is developed mainly in mathematics, but also in other subjects.

It is more than an ability to do basic arithmetic. It involves developing confidence and competence with numbers and measures. It requires understanding of the number system, a repertoire of mathematical techniques, and an inclination and ability to solve quantitative or spatial problems in a range of contexts. Numeracy also demands understanding of the ways in which data are gathered by counting and measuring, and presented in graphs, diagrams, charts and tables. Obviously, then, innumeracy is a lack of numeracy, which is clearly my case.

I have been innumerant for as long as I can remember. I have never been able to grasp the difference between integers and real numbers, which include both rational and irrational numbers, and I’ve been known to confuse the dividend and the divisor from time to time, rendering the quotient quite incomprehensible.

I seem to especially have had trouble with numbers during the time that I was drinking. The times that I told myself, “I’ll just have one...” were, in fact, countless. And I suffered from a faulty sense of multiplication as I always reasoned that if it felt this good after three drinks, just think how good it would feel after six, or twelve, or twenty-seven. Such was my uneven facility with square roots.

Nevertheless, my innumeracy did not prevent me from getting sober, for which I am most grateful. In it’s simplest form, all I had to do to get sober was to count to one.

I remember hearing a woman share at an AA meeting early in my sobriety. She was a hardbitten case, a tough broad you might say, with an uncanny ability to cut through the surrounding tissue and get right to the heart of things.

In telling her story, she related the information that had been told to her when she first showed up in AA. “Blondie,” an old-timer had said, “if you can count to one you can get sober. All you gotta do is stay away from one drink, one day at a time.”

Thankfully, I, too, was able to count to one and I have been sober for many years ever since. In the intervening years, however, that central qualification for achieving sobriety has never changed. I have never had to learn anything more fancy, like algebraic abstinence or right-angle recovery. Just the number one.

So, in the end, this innumeracy thing isn’t so bad. And, while I certainly hope they never need it as I did in AA, if nothing else, at least I have taught my kids the importance of counting to one. 

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