Lobsters

I was young, maybe seven years old, when we visited the Lobster Pound.  It wasn’t a big deal.  Just a walk meant as recreation rather than study,  Interesting, isn’t it, that the more new things one is exposed to the more learning happens, whether you mean for it to or not.

There was a lobster boat unloading the morning’s catch.  The smell of the salt bait, the sea, the fog was imposing.  They used wooden crates back then, and an ancient lead weight scale that was probably older than my grandmother.  The lobsterman loaded a full crate onto the scale.  The pound manager wrote down the weight with a stubby pencil on a pocket sized pad.  They dumped the lobsters out of the crate, weighed the crate separately, and wrote those figures down.  

Why, my little seven year old mind pondered, did they need to weigh an empty crate?  I watched for a while, quiet, taking in everything.  The answer came to me in a flash.

Subtraction.

These actual grown-ups were using subtraction.  Arithmetic up until that moment was a school thing.  We added and subtracted figures on our work sheets, colored in between the figures if we happened to be done before the allotted time, turned in our sheets and were rewarded in due time with a gold star at the top of the page.  But this was different.  These big working men with their stubby pencil were doing subtraction for real.  And if they got it right then the proper amount of money was exchanged and the lobster trade would carry on.

I gained a proper respect for arithmetic on that day.  It wasn’t a grand flash or life changing experience.  It was just another piece in the puzzle of life, put in place by a simple experience.