You can count on me like 1...2...3.
Remember that scene in Rainman where Dustin Hoffman’s character drops a box of toothpicks on the floor, glances down at them, and instantly declares, “246 toothpicks.”
I’m a word guy, but I’ve also always had a head for numbers. My wife Deb calls me Rainman all the time. Whenever we go to dinner with a big group of friends, the check inevitably lands in my lap for me to figure out how much everyone owes.
So, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Leo has inherited this superpower from me.
Leo’s Pre-K class started doing math a couple of month ago. And it was like a lightbulb suddenly went off in his head. He started counting…and hasn’t stopped. At first, he’d sit at the dinner table saying
3+2 = 5 (“My favorite number!”) 20+20= 40 50+50=100
One night, Leo was watching a show on his tablet before bed. I was sitting in a chair in his pitch-black room waiting for him to fall asleep, when, out of the darkness I heard him say, “Papa, 11 +11 = 22.” A few days later, Leo had a fever and woke up in the middle of the night, a screaming, sweaty mess. As we tried to calm him down, I swear to you he was lying there moving his fingers like he was counting in his head.
When Deb goes out with her girlfriends, Leo and I hit the diner for “boys night.” It’s our ritual, he gets chocolate chip pancakes and then, when we leave the diner, Leo walks along the bricks out front and counts every step back to the car. After a bit of zig-zagging around the whole parking lot, he gets to to about 200 before I belt him into his car seat. His latest goal was to reach 1,000, so he continued counting all the way home and made it to about 600 by the time I pulled into the driveway. I told him we could finish counting later on. A day or two later, he picked up counting with Deb right where he left off (he remembered it was exactly 612) and told me, “Mama and me counted from 612 to 1,030.”
Leo’s not just adding the numbers, he remembers them. He’s been playing the game Block Blast a lot on his phone. Over a month after he got his high score, he’s telling people he got 2,372 in the game. Much to just about every grownup’s chagrin, he’s been asking our ages and he remembers them. “Papa, how old are you?” “How old was your grandma when she died (death, the other obsession)?”
Playtime nowadays often involves Leo saying, “give me math questions.” Before long, he started asking for harder numbers. Sometimes we can see him slinking down in his chair and hiding while he counts on his fingers, but other times, he spits the answer right out. At dinner with my parents, my father decided to ask, “what’s 140 + 140.” I objected right away saying that was way too difficult, but my father waved me off and said to give him a second. You could see the gears spinning in Leo’s head and within 30 seconds, he said 260 (hey, he’s not perfect.) But when I started to shake my head, he corrected himself and said “oh no, it’s 280.”
Who is this kid?!!
One morning, Leo summoned me to his room at 7:15 a.m. to play, like he does on most days. When I walked in, he surprised me by singing the Bruno Mars song, “Count on Me.” Leo doesn’t sing much and he hates (translation: gets embarrassed) if I sing in front of anyone else. But there he was singing, “You can count on me, like 1, 2, 3…I’ll be there” and I had no idea where this was coming from. I found out that Leo’s class was singing this song for their end of year Friendship Day (our Pre-K version of graduation day). Talk about the perfect song choice!
I’m not sure if the Avengers need a new superhero, but I’m pretty sure Leo’s not-so-secret identity is now The Human Calculator.