Do the math

I’m often asked by young students what they should study in college in order to become a professional writer. If I was one, perhaps I’d know. Other than the four mandatory years of English in high school, I’ve never taken a writing class in my life. Never. Not one.
    And I’d bet that two of my favorite writers, Mark Twain and Will Rogers, never took a class in creative writing either. A teacher these days would give Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn an F for not being politically correct.
    Since my older brother was a brilliant mathemagician, my mother insisted that I follow in his footsteps and take every math class my high school offered. By the time I also took two hours of ag classes a day, a lecture and a shop class, I didn’t have any time left to take typing. Which is how I’ve made my living, two fingers at a time. Peck, peck, peck.
    I’d probably like math if it wasn’t for all the numbers. It’s just that when I went to school it was after a sinister creature had just created “new math” with all its fancy formulas, powers, subsets, less-thans, square roots and pi. The only thing I know now is that pie tastes better with a dollop of whipped cream, and if your roots, like carrots, onions, tubers and other roots, are square, they’ll dock you at the packing shed.
    Math was good training to become a storyteller. I learned how to round off numbers so that a 5-ounce trout I caught became a 5-pounder, and a Longhorn leppy calf with nubs that charged me became a raving 1-ton maniac with 60-inch horns. In arithmetic, I learned to DIVIDE the bad news so I didn’t dump it all on the reader at one time. I also learned how to MULTIPLY degrees of emotion so that a wife who was just having a bad day became “out of her raving mind.” In my mind-numbing statistics class I learned that the use of numbers should always be kept to a bare minimum. One statistic per paragraph is more than enough.
  

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