I was never a bad student, but it wasn’t like I was particularly outstanding at math. As a kid, like any good mother mine made me memorize my times tables, and we practiced around the kitchen table after the crockery was cleared drilling the multiples of eights and nines and twelves into my malleable brain as Dad put on a record (not literally, of course, but on his phone and channeled through the Bluetooth speaker) from his youth and whistled while he worked away at the sink and the smell of the dishsoap and the vestiges of the smell from the cooking dissipated, subsumed into the neutral smell of the household that was the conglomerate of nights’s-cooking past and dishsoap past and our black lab Bo and all the other smells both active and vestigial that were as invisible to us as an atom and that a household make… at first, I would guess, and occasionally, I would surprise myself by spewing out a number that happened to be the correct one. “Seven times six.”
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I was never a bad student, but it wasn’t like I was particularly outstanding at math. As a kid, like any good mother mine made me memorize my times tables, and we practiced around the kitchen table after the crockery was cleared drilling the multiples of eights and nines and twelves into my malleable brain as Dad put on a record (not literally, of course, but on his phone and channeled through the Bluetooth speaker) from his youth and whistled while he worked away at the sink and the smell of the dishsoap and the vestiges of the smell from the cooking dissipated, subsumed into the neutral smell of the household that was the conglomerate of nights’s-cooking past and dishsoap past and our black lab Bo and all the other smells both active and vestigial that were as invisible to us as an atom and that a household make… at first, I would guess, and occasionally, I would surprise myself by spewing out a number that happened to be the correct one. “Seven times six.”