Blame It All On Carter

If you see me stumbling around Stop ’n’ Shop, having a conversation with myself in two different voices, it’s not because I’m schizophrenic. Honestly, it’s not. It’s because of former president Jimmy Carter.

First of all, math is not my strong point. I count on my fingers. At certain sums I’m adept. A two and a one? Three. I and other mentally capable five-year-olds can do that one right off the top of my head. Four plus four? Eight, right? But then I get to one of the additions that’s traditionally tough for me, like eight plus five. You might not see it, but my fingers are pulsing and my lips are silently working as I count out nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen.

Yes, I count on my fingers. I’m not proud of it. But I’m brave enough to admit to it.

Through much of school I was able discreetly to disguise my dependency on such babyish methods. I fingered my way through the multiplication tables, I twiddled my digits during long division. I managed to hit my stride during the year of geometry, but then faced setbacks during Algebra I. I didn’t understand algebra. Why had all these mysterious letters wandered in? What were they doing sidled up amongst the numbers? I had enough social difficulties in eighth grade without this worst and most confusing integration.

It didn’t help that my Algebra I teacher was a sweetheart and a pushover who happily agreed to teach the ‘gifted and talented’ class in which I’d been plonked. Since mostly I was talented at being lazy and gifted at schmoozing As out of teachers without doing any actual work, I breezed through Algebra I without actually learning anything about the basics of algebra.

It was quite a shock when in tenth grade I landed in Algebra II and began carrying home Ds and Fs on my homework and report cards. My parents at first thought it was because of the teacher. And it was, really. It was the teacher giving me failing grades that I deserved because I had no idea how to balance an equation. There were four or five of us in the class from my Algebra I year, however, and we were all in the same boat. Our parents decided to hire a tutor for us from the local seminary, however. We must’ve been gifted enough—or as I suspect, frightened of our parents’ wrath—because within a couple of months we’d caught up to the rest of the class and I managed to score a respectable, though not enthusiastic, B on my final report card.

Trigonometry was the bane of my senior year. I was fascinated by Miss Bibby, my teacher, who during those late nineteen-seventies apparently set a course for her personal style using Pam Grier and Blaxploitation films as her north star. She taught her class in a stern and unsmiling manner, pointer gripped as tightly in her hand as might a dominatrix brandish a whip, dressed in super-tight pants with flares and a faux-fur jacket, or in high and shiny patent-leather lace-up boots with stiletto heels, a thigh-high skirt, and a diaphanous top that exposed plenty of her ample cleavage. She was addicted to wigs. One day she’d show up in a long ponytail that hung down to her butt. The next she’d have an enormous Coffy-style Afro. (“You call her Coffy and she’ll cream you!”) As fascinating as Miss Bibby herself could be, I sat there day after day in the classroom feeling futile about what we were doing there. I knew I’d never use trigonometry in my future. I never saw my parents calculating a negative sine.

It was when I was fifth or sixth grade that Jimmy Carter really pushed the Metric Conversion Act that had been passed in 1975. In the school system it was a big deal. The metric system was the future of America! We were the only country in the world that hadn’t been metricated, and it was going to happen by 1980, by gum! In math and science classes we watched movies about the metric system and how natural and easy it was to use. We gleefully abandoned traditional twelve-inch rulers in favor of the newer, shinier, more novel metric versions. We were the future, we were told over and over again.

We were also instructed to become little evangelicals for the cause. Our teachers wanted us to use the metric system at home, and gave us the formulae so that we could annoy our parents by telling them it was 13 degrees Celcius outside, or rolling our eyes when they mentioned such hilariously outmoded and antique conventions as ‘miles’ or ‘inches’. The metric system was in, baby, and we were the vanguard!

I actually loved the metric system. English measurements were based on weird fours and eights and twelves, but the ten-times table was easy. Converting three hundred and seventy inches to feet required a lot of work, but all I had to do to convert centimeters to meters was move the decimal point. Those decimal points weigh nothing. And of course I, who was gifted at avoiding as much work as possible and talented at mental torpor, very quickly decided that if the metric system was the future, I’d make a clean break from those English measurements that were as current as, say, dentistry with pliers, or rapid transit via velocipede.

So I simply never learned how many cups were in a pint, or how many pints were in a quart, or how many quarts were in a gallon. It was too much math. Too many fingers to count. Then the rest of the seventies was disco, and CB radio, and the Iran hostage crisis. Then came the eighties and Ronald Reagan, and the metric system was absolutely not the future any longer. People stubbornly stuck to their ounces and their pounds, their bushels and pecks and miles and pints, and like Ishmael, I alone was left to tell the tale of a time when we were promised—promised—that everything could be divided by ten.

But back to Stop ’n’ Shop. There I was, two days before Thanksgiving last week, pushing around an overloaded cart. Connecticut mommies were swerving out of my way as I passed, because like someone without adequate access to mental health care I was talking to myself in an erratic and eccentric manner. In two different voices. Only I wasn’t, really. I had my iPhone clutched in my hand as I stared in panic at the canned goods, knowing that the pie recipe I was using required two cups of pureed sweet potato and how the hell many was that in ounces? Did I need the big can or the small can? Or the one that looked like it should be purchased by a Mormon survivalist? “How many ounces are in two cups?” I asked Siri, in a frenzy.

Siri always obliges when I’m in a demoralizing panic. “There are sixteen! Ounces! In a cup!” it replied, soothingly.

I raced to the dairy aisle. “How much is two cups in pints?!”

“Two cups! Are one pint!”

“Oh my god, how many god-damned teaspoons are in a god-damned gallon?!”

“There are seven hundred! And sixty-eight! God-damned teaspoons! In a god-damned gallon!”

Siri’s cursing is pure wish-fulfillment in the last one. But I get the sense that Siri would loosen the tie a little bit and let loose with profanity outside business hours.

Either way, when I’m lumbering through the supermarket, crashing my cart into little old ladies and mumbling questions to myself that my coat pocket answers and then counting on my fingers, I’m sure I’m a sight to see. And in the meantime, no matter how many times I ask the same questions over and over, I never remember. It’s too late for me. My brain is too feeble and aged to forge the new neural paths for junk I should’ve learned in fifth grade.

Damn you, former president Jimmy Carter! That Metric Conversion Act turns me into a social outcast whenever I set foot in a grocery store!