Bizz-Buzz-Bang-Whack-Crash-Gesund

49 has always been my bète noir numérique. Why? Why, oh, why…

I was a mathlete in high school, and a pretty good one. I thought, perhaps, that I was A Great Mathlete. I went to the State Mathletes Meet a few times, and on all three occasions, I got my ass handed to me in every conceivable way. It wasn’t exactly fun. My first trip, the kids from Bronx Science made me feel stupid, and then kicked my butt at ultimate frisbee for good measure.

But I did twice have the honor of representing Section IV in the State Bizz Buzz Championship. You remember Buzz, right? It’s a counting game: I say, “one,” you say, “two,” and when we get to seven, someone says, “Buzz!” Then you keep counting, saying “buzz” for any number that is either a multiple of seven, or that has the number seven in it. You can make it a little more interesting by requiring that players say “buzz” multiple times if a number meets the criterion more than once. For example, 77 would be “buzz-buzz-buzz” because it has two sevens and is a multiple of seven.

At the State Mathletes Meet, we played a rather involved version. Sevens were “buzz,” and we also had sounds for two other digits. As players were knocked out, we added more rules. The winner got a t-shirt. I lost badly the first time I played.

Ah, but my senior year, I had ambitions. I was focused. The other numbers were four (“bizz”) and five (“bang”). I survived into adding a sound for perfect squares (“whack”), and then a rule for primes (“crash”). We started with maybe 20 kids, and when it got down to seven or eight, they added a sound for all the numbers that weren’t anything else (“gesund”). So, no numbers were being said aloud. And you couldn’t work ahead, because if someone missed, her number moved to the next player.

We got to the seventies, and down to 6 players. In the eighties, we lost another. And in the nineties, one more fell by the wayside, leaving me and three Bronx kids (two who were brothers). I was feeling saucy. My turn came and the number was ninety-eight. I had 20 seconds, but needed just a few to confidently say, “buzz” (I knew it was 14 times 7) and “whack” (just a little cocky that I’d caught that it was a multiple of 49, a perfect square). The judge gave me a few beats, and when I didn’t add anything, said, “No.”

To this day, I can’t understand how I missed saying “buzz” twice when I knew that 98 was a multiple of 49, which is 7 times 7. But hey, none of us are as smart as we think we are. I like to think I could have hung with those two brothers into the 150s (dubious).

I kinda hate the number 49, though. It’s a big, fat reminder about how no matter how good you might think you are at something, you’re probably nowhere near the top of the list of the billions of folks in this world. Michael Jordan might have been an exception, but even His Airness aged.

I travelled to India a couple of times on business back in 1999 and 2000. On the first trip, I had a few hours in the Amsterdam airport, and went to a café to grab a coffee. A young American at the other end of the bar heard my accent, and offered to buy my coffee in exchange for a few minutes of conversation with somebody from home. His name was Johnny and he was (wait for it) a professional bicycle motocross on ice racer. You can be a professional at that, I asked? Yes, Johnny explained, not in the US, but it was popular enough that he could go do the season in Europe with a sponsor, make a little money, and do this thing he loved. Who knew?

Just trying to think of a question, I asked Johnny if there was a Michael Jordan of bicycle motocross on ice, and he said, “Oh, yeah… Sven. He’s this Belgian dude, and he just sits on your shoulder until there are a couple of laps left, and then he blows by laughing. Yeah, I’m just Sven’s bitch.” “Well, Johnny,” I opined, “in the end we’re all just somebody’s bitch.” Johnny liked that so much that he got out a little notebook and wrote it down, along with my name.

I gotta say that I like getting older. But as 49 looms, it does feel like a curtain of lead I’ll need to pass through on the way to more curtains of denser materials. I suppose I once thought I was hot stuff in the business world, or as a writer, or… at something. But I’m not really mourning the loss of those delusions now. That grief is long gone, and pale by comparison with Grief. No, I like the idea of growing older and just being some guy… much less pressure than being a young man of Great Expectations (even if the only expectations were your own).

Aging is more prosaic than all that. It’s knees that are never quite right and back trouble that can be kept almost at bay by dull, daily exercise. It’s watching your kids be like you remember yourself, and knowing there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s realizing that no ship, not even a relatively small one, is going to come in with a sudden infusion of capital that will relieve your worries about tuition, retirement, and ongoing support of all sorts. And that’s the lead curtain.

I don’t think I’ll care about 50. For me it’s always been about 49, and here it is, seven squared—that’s TWO sevens, buzz-buzz-whack—half of 98, where I lost the State Bizz-Buzz championship in ‘83. Am I just another guy stuck in high school glory days? I don’t think so. I’ve always been a counter, counting up, counting down. I can’t even tell you how many ways I count laps in the pool. 49 or 50, it’s just another, imperfect number on the way to the last one, but the space between is where it happens, so I’d better get busy crafting more lines of X syllables, solving for all the variables I can, making the ledger balance at the end of the month, coming in on the right beat.

Count on it.