$200 For Passing Go

Actually in my case it was £200 For Passing Go: I grew up playing Monopoly and just about any other board game that involved trying to roll a double 6. Like many people of my generation it was the family thing to do, sometimes more than one night a week.

I grew up at #25 Coombe Bridge Avenue in Bristol, England. You can actually do a virtual drive by to see it on Google Earth in "street view". So 25 was a really important number in my childhood years just as 200 and 6+6 were. Later, when I took my GCE exams in High School 45 was a monumental number as it was the score one needed to pass. It was only a D but it was a pass. Later still 311 became a significant number; it was the room that contained the desks of all the Grad Ed students in the Education Department at the University of Illinois when I was a grad student. I first left the UK to come to the US at Gate 32 at Heathrow.

Our lives are defined by numbers for good, bad or indifference. These numbers are not only the numbers we are assigned such as SS numbers, telephone numbers, or the combinations of our bicycle locks. They are the incidental numbers of life, the house numbers, the cultural numbers such as 50 States, the numbers of siblings we have, the year we were born, our height , age, and weight, the Interstate we take to work, our house number, and so on. Each of us has a number profile that defines, guides us, controls us and says, in a subtle, often overt way, exactly who we are............This is my  blog entry #200.