Last night I was driving down to my favorite Thai place in town to pick up some dinner. The restaurant is pretty much a straight shot from our house towards downtown. I’ve probably driven that stretch hundreds of times, and it’s stayed mostly the same over the years. Until recently.
There’s a new, 12-story building going up near the restaurant that makes big changes to the I.C. skyline. It was turning dark as I went past the tower last night, and I noticed for the first time the aircraft warning lights on the building’s roof. It made me think about all the helicopter traffic there is between Iowa City and cities to the east that ferry critically ill patients to and from the tertiary care facility at the university’s hospital here. Some of those flights come right over the new building and then must drop down to land on the helipad at the hospital.
I wondered how, or whether, this new obstacle changed the way these pilots approached the hospital. Which in turn prompted me to think about the magnetic heading the pilots must have to memorize as they fly between all the hospitals in the Midwest. Those are numbers I (almost) never think about, but that they absolutely need to do their jobs.
I have plenty of my own numbers to memorize. Birthdays. Phone numbers. Passwords. IP addresses. Mailing addresses. Most people have to carry around those numbers. But I have close friends and family who have to memorize completely different sets of numbers to function in their daily lives. Having all these numbers disappear would be like losing the electricity in your house; you’d still be sitting there in front of your TV, but everything would be dark.
I was trying to count with Ava the other day by holding my hand in front of her face and pointing at my fingers, slowly counting out each one up to five. It was interesting to watch the look on her face. It was like she knew something was going on, but she had no way to process it. The concept that that there’s a way to attach significance to an item in any way other than giving it a name (ball, fish, dog, grandma) just doesn’t appear to register yet.
It’s the same story with colors. Ava has a red ball. And a yellow bus. She has a box of big crayons that come in black, orange, pink, and blue. But as of now, black, yellow, and pink crayons sitting together on her table are only “crayons.” There’s no number for them in her world (“three crayons”). No names for their colors (“pink crayon; black crayon”). At least not in any way that she can yet convey to us. It’s wonderful to try to think about what her mind must be like right now. It’s such an empty vessel in so many ways, waiting, ready to be filled with all these words and numbers. So far, her words have come like intermittent raindrops from the leading edge of a good spring shower. I wonder if sometime soon they’ll begin to flood from her. I hope so.