When I turned 49 last year, a friend told me to expect great things.
A year of wonders, she predicted. Romance, fortune, happy communions and serendipitous partings. In my 49th year, she promised, the world would be spinning my way from birthday to birthday.
The reason for her confident optimism on my behalf was numerical. Or more precisely, numerological. The number 7 is lucky, she said, and 7 times 7 is seven times luckier. I should start pricing Mercedes, she said.
Now I generally don’t hold with mathematical mysticism, possibly because I’ve never been particularly good at math. All those numbers give me a nervous stomach. On the other hand, I know enough about the strange and intricate ways of numbers to hold them in high regard. In the hands of their priests, humble digits can be made to perform miracles, and to reveal secrets beyond the salon philosopher’s most ambitious imaginings.
The ancients certainly liked numbers, and they seemed to know a thing or two about turning them to productive purpose. The ancient Chaldeans believed the number 49 to be fraught with portent, although their endless metaphysical dissection of it failed to predict the Persian armies that reduced Chaldea to one of history’s lowest common denominators. The medieval Masons took 49 for a harbinger of change, but somehow managed to keep from actually changing for the next 1,200 years and counting.
Compounded of 49 symbols, ancient Sanskrit styled itself the language of the gods. The Zohar tells us there are 49 possible interpretations of the Kabbalistic “Writings”, and Tibetans have long believed the soul must wander between Earth and Sky for 49 days before getting clearance to land in the Great Beyond.
So it’s not like 49 doesn’t come with credentials.
Still, I wasn’t expecting much, because in 49 years I’ve learned to never expect much. Truth be told, I pretty much forgot about my hypothetical arithmetical advantage until last week, when I took in mind to run a quick mental inventory of the preceding calendar to see if that magic number had any quantifiable influence on my circumstance. The results, I discovered, are mixed.
I didn’t get rich, but I didn’t go bust, either. I picked up some new clients, and made reasonable progress on two separate books. On the other hand, my Lotto activities were utterly unproductive. While I did win $3 in April, I sank the winnings into fresh statistical opportunities that didn’t pan out.
I had a scary moment on Silver Plume Mountain in August. Took a fall and messed up my ankle pretty good. It happened at the top of a cork-tight canyon full of deadfall and roaring snowmelt. Thankfully, the ankle wasn’t broken, and after raising a fine stink that nobody got to hear I managed to creep my way down 3 miles and 3,000 feet of Nature’s Worst.
In July I got a voucher from eMachines for free electronics. Seems a tower I owned maybe 10 years ago had a bad floppy drive. Since I didn’t know that at the time, because even I, and even 10 years ago, was too hip for floppies, I didn’t feel especially injured, but could hardly say no to free stuff. Turns out I was given my choice of reconditioned items that I didn’t need or want. I now have a used tablet collecting dust on my shelf because I’m too cheap to pay for the service that will make it work.
In October my car started acting up, losing power, smoking excessively. I took it to the shop. The mechanics started pricing new engines for me. It was a cruel blow. I’d been determined to get 250,000 miles out of that car or know why not, and here it was kaput at a mere 160,000. Fortunately, a car-savvy acquaintance proposed some possible fixes short of a $3,000 rebuild. While his diagnoses turned out to be somewhat wide of the true mark, by persistently bringing them up I seemed to have sparked a bright new era of diligence in the garage and the mechanics eventually contrived a way to restore my choking motor to like-new condition for a considerably gentler $1,800.
Last week’s live telecast of The Sound of Music starring Carrie Underwood was a Finsteraarhorn-sized stinker, by all accounts, but I didn’t try to watch it.
Fact is, a good many good things happened to me last year, but every good thing was accompanied either fore or aft by some cosmos-balancing bummer. Frankly, that pretty well describes the world as I’ve come to know it, and I’m perfectly comfortable with the arrangement. But what does it say to my friend’s numerological prophesies?
Nothing bad, actually.
As it happens, Zoroastrians did and do regard the number 49 as a symbol of dichotomy, instructive of the eternal tussle going on between fundamental concepts such as light and dark, life and death, good and evil, Coke and Pepsi. Seen that way, my hitch as a 49-year-old has gone more or less by the numbers.
The way I figure it, that’s lucky enough.
