In third grade, my middle son

ended up teaching his class math.

I questioned how that helped him.

It didn’t add up,

but the teacher shrugged and said

she didn’t know what else to do.

When she made that pronouncement,

her nose, a slightly askew

isosceles triangle, leaned further left,

as if it also wasn’t convinced of her logic.

Years later, at an experimental college

in southern California,

my son attended the first day of

Introduction to Philosophy.

The professor swept in,

overconfident, like a syllogism

trying to convince itself

of its own validity and truth.

The professor stared at the class

for a full minute then asked,

“How many of you believe

two plus two equals four?”

My son raised his hand.

The professor said,

“I’m here to tell you

two plus two doesn’t necessarily equal two.”

But the remainder, the memory, how my son

had taught his fellow third graders

day after day under the gray skies of Northeast Ohio,

had shown them how to find the sums

and the common denominators, how to distinguish

odd from even, and even from odd, so

in response to his philosophy prof’s pronouncement,

he stood up and said the only thing he could say,

“I can’t stay in a class where

two plus two doesn’t equal four.”

And he escaped into the California sunshine

and got on a plane and came home and said,

“Ahh, now I can be as pale as I want to be,”

and the equation was somehow solved for a while.