Does it seem like our lives are all about the numbers?

Sports fans, at least the winners and uninformed losers, all claim to be number one. All the folks playing professional sports wear numbers and sell jerseys bearing those numbers to fans. Doesn’t the number 12 mean something special here in the Pacific Northwest? The difference of one point in almost any athletic contest is almost always the determining factor causing either euphoria or despair. In addition, we all keep track of the number of years we have lived someplace or have been married, or even the number of times we have been married or the number of years we are old. (More on that later.)

Jake Beattie, the executive director of the Northwest Maritime Center in Port Townsend, gave a terrific Dine and Discover presentation focused on the Race to Alaska. We found out that this coming June, there will be a third opportunity to participate. That is after the 2015 race in which 40 racers made it to the Stage One finish line in Victoria, British Columbia, and 15 racers made it to the finish line in Ketchikan, Alaska. In 2016, there were 26 racers making it to Ketchikan, after 35 racers started out from Port Townsend.

BJ and I sat with Carol and Rich Durbin, Sharon and Vic Draper, and Bev and Bernie Kestler. The numbers I caught from the Kestlers are nothing short of amazing. First of all, they are both incredibly energetic despite more than 80 years of being on earth. Bev gets Bernie to drive her over to the marina every day to feed the rumored thousands of gulls that see them coming and swarm their car. They have been married 62 years and, according to Bev, spend every minute they are both awake together. After dinner that evening, the rest of us at the table noted that they defied all known warnings about the cause of diabetes as we watched Bernie put seven packs of sugar on the top of his piece of apple pie, while Bev claimed to have received 9 pounds of See’s chocolates for Christmas, some which may still be left. My friends, they are amazing. We saw the excellent new movie “Hidden Figures” over the weekend, and if you want to know what the number 7,090 refers to, that is a great place to find out (if you don’t already know).

And then, there is the age thing. As of my birthday last Sunday, I have become sensitive to the number 73 because, well, now I join others in Port Ludlow who can claim it as their own. Seventy-three may be the “rock star” of numbers. You see, 73 is the 21st prime number, a natural number greater than one that has no positive divisors other than one and itself. The mirror of 73 is 37, which is the 12th prime number, 12 being the mirror of 21. So, you can already see some of the unique properties of the number. In addition, in Morse code, the number 73 is – … … –, a palindrome, that is, the sequence of characters is the same whether taken forward or backward. I am told there are other attributes of the number 73, including the binary representation of the number, 1001001, also being a palindrome, even though some “scholars” contend that since the binary numbering system usually includes eight digits, this representation would require a leading zero.

So, may your sports teams win by at least one, may we all celebrate those who defy conventional wisdom on so many levels, and may you congratulate yourself on wallowing through all those numbers generally useful only at cocktail parties, or maybe not.

Love a curmudgeon and have one great week!

(Contact Port Ludlow resident Ned Luce at nedluce@sbcglobal.net.)