There’s an old joke about a superstitious gambler heading for the racetrack. On the way there, he remembered that he had woken up at 5.25 a.m.; that he had to catch the Number 25 bus to get to the horses. And so it went. Then he saw that, in the fifth race, there was a filly called Quinque – Latin for five – in the fifth race with odds at five-to-one. He bet a good deal of money on this certain winner. Sure enough, it came in – fifth.
Remembering this story last week, I was reminded of the way in which the number 2 seemed to crop up in my parents’ lives. Obviously, I was also involved in parts of that process, too. Let me explain. My father was born in 1918 and my mother in 1920, and that’s where this whole thing began; that two-year difference in ages. My father was one of two children. He had an older sister. My mother grew up in a family of seven, of which four (2×2) were girls.
How my parents got to know each other, I have no idea. They weren’t the sort of people who talked about such matters. Which is a pity because I missed out on a good deal of family history and myth. Anyway, love was defined differently in those days. Although they were teenagers apparently, they became a couple and married after years of courtship. They had been married only two months when yours truly was conceived. (No, they didn’t tell me that either, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to compare dates on their marriage and my birth certificates.) I was born two weeks late.
After leaving England, they lived in six (3×2) foreign countries. Then, two months and two weeks after their forty-ninth anniversary, my father died. My mother followed, exactly two years, two months and two days later. So there we are.
But I’m left with a nagging question. Given the recurrence of the number 2 in my parents’ lives, I’d still like to know why I’m an only child.
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