Sticking Points

In re the last line of the previous post (“Amazing what sticks with you, no?”):

Although I have long had difficulty remembering numbers—a cashier can tell me how much I owe, and I will have to look at the cash-register screen before writing the check—I have long been amazed at how well certain numbers stick in my head…and how poorly others do.

For instance, I recall instantly my family’s phone number from my boyhood in Omaha—though you might say that 393-1393 is a pretty easy number to remember, even forty years on. How, then, that I still remember my grandfather’s number—393-1632—some twenty years after his death? Or my best friend, Joe’s, number, 393-1395?

Time seems to have little to do with it. I remember those numbers from forty years ago, but can’t recall my college phone numbers from thirty years ago. I only remember that the numbers in Swanson Hall were whatever the campus prefix was plus 4 and the room number—4747 my freshman year and 4743 my sophomore year. But I have no recollection at all what our number was when a couple of friends and I moved off-campus our junior and senior years. I can’t even think what it may have started with.

I can remember the number I had in St. Paul—698-1276—but I can’t remember if I had that same number in my first apartment, on Cretin Avenue South, or just in the apartment Peg and I took on St. Paul Avenue when we were first married. My office number at the Webb Company started out as 698-7450, I think, and later switched to 690-7450 as the neighborhood outgrew the 698 prefix.

We moved to Sioux Falls in 1984, but I have no idea what the phone number was for the year we lived on Louise Avenue. I do recall that, like all the phones on that end of town in those days, it began with 361. This was the cause of some confusion, for it had not been too many years since every blessed telephone number in town began with 33. Indeed, when my family first moved here in the late 1960s, the town was small enough that it could exist on not only that single EDison exchange, but also that only the odd numbers needed to be attached to it: 332, 334, 336, 338. This led to the annoying habit of many locals to give only five-digit phone numbers:

What’s your number?

It’s two seven nine three five.

Um…two sev— that’s not enough numbers, is it?

Which of course made you look like the idiot. More idiotic, though, is that too many people in my community still insist on giving you only five digits if the first two are both threes, even though the town’s population explosion coupled with the breakup of the Bell System means it’s been over twenty years since every number in town was on the EDison exchange.

You might say that duration would cause a number to stick, and that would make some sense, I suppose. But I had the same number at Stafford Advertising for three years or so, and today haven’t the vaguest idea what it might have been. Wouldn’t three years be enough for a number to stick?

You might say that the number’s relative importance would cause it to stick—but wouldn’t a work number be pretty important? And if nothing else, wouldn’t the sheer number of times you give out your work number cause it to lodge pretty solidly? Anyhow, what would you make of the fact that I can remember not only my Omaha friend, Joe’s, phone number so clearly but also my Sioux Falls childhood friend, Dave’s number, and yet can’t remember that of the girl I dated pretty steadily through high school, nor my wife’s from before we were married?

Maybe it has to do with age—not that I’m getting old and forgetting things, since the odd stuff I obviously do remember seems to negate that idea. I mean, the age I was when I learned things. When you’re a kid, knowing your family’s phone number is a big deal. It’s important. Perhaps my parents worked with me to ensure that I knew it in case I got lost. Maybe that’s why I remember my grandfather’s number…but why, then, don’t I remember my other grandfather’s number, since he was alive until I was 10 or 11? Unless it’s precisely because he died when I was a kid, while my other grandfather lived until I was in my thirties.

But of course all the numbers of all the lockers I ever had in school are long gone, as are their combinations. Most room numbers vanished only a couple of weeks into the school year: once I learned where they were it was no longer necessary to remember what they were. Except our old Debate Room at Washington High School was 419.

Street addresses stick a little longer, apparently. 7433 Hascall Street. 4527 Decatur Street. 1533 St Paul Avenue. And so on. Do we utilize a house number more than a phone number?

I am reminded (for a few things stick, you know) of a Blondie comic from years ago, a Sunday strip, in which a fellow appears on the Bumsteds’ doorstep telling them that he grew up in that house and was wondering if he could look around. They invite him in, and he sentimentally recalls sliding down that old banister, sitting in the kitchen as his mother cooked, playing in his old room, etc. Tearfully, as he’s leaving, he thanks them for their trouble and avers that he will never forget those wonderful days at good old 123 Elm Street or whatever the address was.

And of course the Bumsteds have to inform him that this is Maple Street, and Elm is two blocks over.