12421

12421 is my favorite address in all of Juneau. Every time I drive by it, I giggle and start quivering in excitement.

When I was a kid, I loved addresses. Since my father regularly felt the need to cruise through neighborhoods in his big white whale of a car to see how the city was doing, I had plenty of time to slouch in my seat and look at addresses. I would play the ultimate nerd game of seeing how many different equations and patterns I could make with the numbers.

Hence why 12421 is a fabulous address. Not only are there wonderful patterns and equations, but it is a palindrome. Palindromes run a close second to apple pie in making me smile. Hannah should thank her father everyday that she is not named "race car".

I love addresses for the same reason I love doing my taxes. Bringing order out of chaos, finding patterns in what looks like disarray, looking for shortcuts in what appears to be overwhelming tedium is joy in pure form. This is my love.

Details always caught me up in math. I get so wrapped up in process, I miss the little things. I remember doing a multi-page problem that I ultimately got wrong. I got the process right, but missed multiplying 6x7 correctly.

My math advisor laughed at me when I left a math major to double major in world religions and theater. Luckily, I realized early I was a big picture person and my crazy double major fit my weird way of thinking, even if it did open me up to tele-evangelist jokes for the rest of my life.

But, I will always be thankful for my little math voice telling me to pay attention to details. I try to keep this in mind when I start skimming through the boring parts of the Bible for the great schemes and patterns. I'm happy to have the dimensions of the ark and the temple so there is something to read at an engineer's funeral, but they kind of kill me to slog through.

Except the details matter. Life is not always patterns and ordering. Sometimes all order, reason, and shortcuts get thrown into complete confusion and you are left with the details and long slog. No sense can be made, no shortcuts through; you have to get up, make coffee, and put one foot in front of the other.

As much as I love seeking order and connections, sometimes the cruelty, unfairness and randomness of life trumps and all I can see is the next step.  It's my least favorite place in the world to be (unless there is apple pie), but that's how it goes. You have to pass a lot of addresses before you get to 12421.

P.S. I told Hannah I was writing about 12421 and she literally gasped and said how much she loved that address.