Mind That Does Not Stick

 “Mind that does not stick.”

                                                       —Zen Master Shoitsu

The thought that first comes to my mind is the amount of literal stickiness that a mind can physically possess: this can’t be right. There’s got to be some deeper, more physiological meaning to this. But I can’t think of any. Possibly it’s referring to when I’m sitting in geometry class and Mrs. Hoyt is explaining the Pythagorean Theorem, and it just will not stick. Maybe it’s when I’m still learning times tables in my junior year.

Perhaps, stickiness is not measured in how sticky it is, but in how much sticky substance there is. Possibly it’s referring to how I need to be taught the difference between obtuse, right and acute over and over and over again. Maybe it’s just that my mind does not stick to math problems. Perhaps my mind is the not-so-sticky one.

For as long as I can remember, I have been special, and not in the good way. In first grade I can remember being pulled off to the side when we did addition and subtraction problems, being told, “You’ll get it” over and over and over again. My teacher would sit with me and repeat again and again how to line up my numbers and add them. I would stare blankly off into space and imagine storylines. I would gather up all these characters in my head, and without knowing it, find antagonists and protagonists and make an entire cast. I would set them in their places, dragging them from one side of my mind to the other and begin to imagine. This all done while my teacher turned red in the face and spluttered on about carrying the ones. I didn’t care to carry my ones; I had a movie playing in my head, tuning her out.

When I was around seven years old, my parents thought I was old enough to visit my grandparents in upstate New York for a week, alone. One night my grandma was talking on the phone with my mom and said “Zoë is so easy, she can entertain herself doing anything!” My mom said, “yes, Zoë has a very rapid imagination.” The reason why I was such a blessing to my elderly grandparents was because I would plop myself down in any room of their house and use anything available to make stories. They had lots of toys, but none of them were people. They had a big bucket of cars, a plastic barn complete with all types of animals and hundreds of playing cards. I would build houses out of the cards, make the cars people, and the animals were pets. I named all my characters and assessed them by type of car (model and year) then gave them a basic personality, which could fluctuate depending on what I needed them to do. I remember distinctly a sparkly purple sports car that looked relatively new, I named her Sparkle. She was outgoing and very pretty; her boyfriend was a monster truck from a McDonald’s Happy Meal. He was gruff and mean, and eventually, Sparkle left him for an older fire truck who was timid and shy.

It was only at night that this ability to create the make-believe became a problem. My grandparents slept downstairs, and I was supposed to sleep upstairs, all by myself. My imagination got the better of me every night I sat up, terrified, staring out into the dark. After a week of quiet afternoons and horrifying nights, I went back home and summer ended.

Back at school, my teachers still tried to make math stick in my mind. I went to different rooms and had aides help me with all my work. I remember in fourth grade being put in a group with another girl to practice multiplication facts and realizing for the first time that I was different. This girl was some kind of prodigy, I was sure, because she whipped through the flash cards when I tested her, barely catching her breath before each answer. She conquered the twos then the threes and before I knew it she was yelping out the answers to the nines. We finished up with nine times nine and she said eighty-one without drop of hesitation. When it was my turn, I oozed hesitation from every orifice. I stumbled blindly through my twos, got caught up on my threes and fell flat on my face on my four. I didn’t even make it to the nines and I was told by my teacher to go home and practice. Though practice I did, those darned multiplication facts continued to evade me.

When I got to middle school things only got worse. By the time I got to seventh grade, I had to go to a separate room to do math. There were only six students in this class and it continued into my eighth-grade year. My teacher would look at me exasperatedly as I fumbled through graphs and word problems, waiting for me to “just get it, already.” But sadly for her, that day never came. She would say “Zoë, pay attention and explain how much money Pablo will have at the end of a month if he gets one ruble the first day, two rubles the second day and so on by using exponential reasoning.”

I didn’t know what exponential reasoning was or why it mattered. I was pretty sure if Pablo wanted to know how much money he was going to make, he should wait till the end of the month and count it himself. And rubles? We aren’t in Russia, and for that matter Pablo is not even a Russian name! The entire story line was confusing and, in the end, hopeless. I stared at her while I thought this all over. I had come to a pretty solid conclusion, and I was sure she would see my side of it. She did not. When I was done explaining the ridiculousness of the scenario--and the entire class was laughing (yes, all six of them) -- she sent me out to sit in yet another room, this time all by myself. I knew what I had done wrong, but I wasn’t trying to be a nuisance; that was the only way I could answer the question. I stayed in the other room for the rest of the block, receiving one-on-one help until I understood.

One Christmas I didn’t have any money to buy my mom a present. I decided I was going to write her a book. This was ambitious as I was only about ten at the time. I sat down with my pad of yellow paper and a number-two pencil. I wrote a harrowing tale of a young girl living with her evil parents who didn’t love her and smoked lots of cigarettes. It was one page. This was the complete opposite of my mom and dad, and I must have realized that it would have been offensive to give it to her. I gave my mom a card that year with some little Job Lot trinket that I can’t remember.

 I was always writing things when I was younger. When I was in first grade, I wrote a short story about a princess who lived under her tyrant of a father and longed to escape with her prince. One night, she ran away and I explained, in surprising detail for a six year old, her journey through the kingdom and out onto the grounds. But for some reason, my most memorable experiences of that year are of not understanding math.

“Mind that does not stick”

I think that all minds are built differently and out of different material. Some are Velcro, with all the mathematical information that is thrown at them sticking instantly; others are made of sponge, absorbing everything that comes into contact with them.  Mine is neither of these. My mind is a pool of things where I can drop in certain facts and swirl them together into something that makes sense to me, my mind does not necessarily “stick” but instead “creates”.