Waiting for a Baby and Solving Equations

The book in my mom’s hands means something. I can tell by the way she holds it in two hands, as if she’s offering me a gift.

“We were waiting for you to be born,” she says, “when we bought this.”

I expect something like Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, which, at the time I was born was the second-best selling book next to the Bible.

I do not expect the title she shows me—Self-Taught Basic Algebra.

“Your dad and I both wanted to learn algebra,” she says. “So we bought this book. After supper we’d work the problems. Sometimes we didn’t stop until midnight.”

I imagine them hunched over the kitchen table, each with their pencil and paper, playing with letters and numbers and symbols, trying to find answers. They had no social media, no television, no radio. They didn’t spend an evening on the town, eating out and watching a movie.

But together they learned how to combine like terms and how to isolate all the unknowns on one side of an equation. They read about two trains leaving a town at the same time and traveling in opposite directions at the rates of 40 and 50 miles per hour. And they figured out how many hours it would take until the trains were exactly 270 miles apart.

Having this much fun until midnight must have cost them during the next early-morning milking. But apparently it was worth it.

“Sometimes before going to bed, we’d get to laughing,” my mom says. “Laughing hard.”

Her eyes take on a dreamy look. And she chuckles again, remembering.

“We never did figure out,” she says, “why algebra did that to us.”

In education, we call this interbrain synchrony. It happens when people cooperate to solve a problem. When two people’s neurons fire together for an evening of puzzling, they find each other on the same wavelength, and it feels mighty good.

I ask to borrow Self Taught Basic Algebra. I want to leaf through its pages and imagine how my parents spent those evenings together as they waited for me to be born.

“Make sure you bring this back,” my mom says, when she hands it to me.

And I will. Maybe they’ll want to review some algebra.