Patterns Were My Profession

Chapter 3 — Patterns Were My Profession

My son had apparently decided, somewhere along the way, that growing older meant growing less intelligent.

That gray hair meant weakness.

That grief meant confusion.

It is a common enough assumption, and a convenient one, and it is almost always wrong.

He had forgotten a great many things about the woman he was trying to have declared incompetent.

He had forgotten who taught him to balance his very first checking account, sitting at the kitchen table with a pencil and a paper ledger.

He had forgotten that when he was fourteen and took a twenty-dollar bill from my purse, I knew within the hour, not because I counted the money obsessively but because he had put the remaining bills back facing the wrong direction, and I had noticed the pattern break the way I noticed every pattern break.