Our parents shape our lives. Even those who abandon us leave indelible marks on our psyches. Wonderful, painful, soothing, agitating, perplexing, satisfying, loving, and even the hatred—all of our reactions to them mold us. By the time we realize this fully, chances are they’ve departed our physical lives, living only in our memories and those of others. When I reflect on my father, I’ve come to realize he formed me more than any other person. One aspect of that recurs multiple times in a day when my mind ‘blinks’ and spits out an arithmetic calculation or it juggles a jumble of letters seemingly without conscious thought and spits out a perfectly spelled word. Patterns and numbers, numbers and patterns, all a gift, a curse from my father.

My father, Howard Bliss Pilcher, loved numbers. More than that he loved doing things with them, and he did them quickly. He inherited this from his mother, and he bequeathed it me for which I’ve (mostly) been grateful all my life. This pattern-recognition talent allowed me to move from career to career doing things I had no training to do. Yet there I was. My father never fully realized that aspect of it though I think he could have. I brought dreams and abstraction to his gift, seeing patterns in just about everything. His fixation with patterns and numbers remained in the concrete, the defined, the specific.

Numbers make patterns as do letters and words. Again, my father dwelt on how the letters made words yet never scaled the heights (plumbed the depths?) of how words make sentences and sentences make Writing. Not that he couldn’t write well, but his writing never would have challenged anyone in a writing club. It’s as if playing with the nuts and bolts was so much fun, why become a mechanic? He would delight in words with odd combinations of letters or how words tripped off of the tongue. He adored knowing arcane and niche words such as triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13). He once stumped us all (Mom, my brother, and me) at the game Probe by playing the word eleemosynary. This word describes things related to charity including being dependent on it. In Probe, played a bit like the paper game Hangman, contestants choose words by putting letters face down on a tray with 12 spaces. If the word is smaller than 12 letters, one fills the extra spaces with blank cards. Each player takes a turn guessing specific letters of their opponents. In that way it also resembles Wheel of Fortune. My brother and I were about nine and eleven, respectively. We expected and understood that our parents would use words with which we would be familiar. We had very good vocabularies due to hanging around them and from our incessant reading. As you might surmise, however, we were unfamiliar with eleemosynary. Heck, my mother didn’t know it! When all players of Probe have had their words revealed except for one, the remaining players each have two turns to guess the word. We never came closer than thinking it was elephant. I remember nearly sixty years later being so upset as to be near tears that he would think we’d know this word! He apologized, grinning awkwardly, sputtered something about charity—but he kept the points.

But doesn’t everybody?

Around this time we learned from our Uncle Gordy, my father’s brother, that he (and maybe their parents) had teased my father for his repeated incredulity that someone didn’t know something or do something that he did. “But doesn’t everybody…” became a way to slightly dig at his recurring belief that everyone could do what he did. This caused him to try to teach me to do long division in my head when I was 8, and before it had been taught in school using paper and pencil. On top of it all, we were weeding the garden at the time. That episode ended with me crying. Some other cases in point:

Every year in the arid West the pine trees drop needles and cones. Thankfully these events do not occur simultaneously to the best of my memory. Spokane might be the capital of the Lawn Nazis, those people who will semi-innocently ask you if you need help with lawn “because I noticed it’s getting a little long” or “I see you’ve had a bit of difficulty getting to your needles.” One did not leave needles and cones lying around on the lawn! I hated raking needles which my father always seemed to pawn off on his boys. Picking up cones, however, somewhat delighted him because as he picked them up, he would count them. “We got 103 cones this year from the front yard. That’s a new record I think!” and off he’d go to check. Yes, he kept track. When we were long gone, I could tell he still did this because the new neighbor across the street knew exactly what we were talking about decades later.

Our family vacations every summer involved driving for up to two weeks to visit scenic wonders and relatives. By the time I entered high school I had visited most of the national parks in the West, though getting further south than the Grand Canyon remained for my adulthood. On these vacations my mother rarely drove (and when she did it was with white knuckles—hers, not ours). My father kept car records on a 5.5 inch by 8.5 inch piece of stock on which he manually drew lines and columns. Each gas fill-up required the date, an odometer reading, the number of gallons purchased, and then while the attendant filled up the car’s tank (ah, those were the days) he would calculate the car’s gas mileage since the previous gas stop.

On any drive, vacation or not, we would at intervals be treated to his light double-tap of the horn and announcing to the car’s passengers, “that’s fifty thousand miles!” or “look! All fives!” Yes, he celebrated when the odometer read 55,555.5 miles. Or when he got 12345.6 miles. There were many possibilities. (Unfortunately this rubbed off on me a little bit. I routinely wake during the night and say to myself, “Oh, it’s one-two-three-four” when the clock reads 12:34 a.m.)

He particularly fixated on license plates. It feels wrong to say he memorized them. My father saw license plate designations as others do names they want to remember. He didn’t know only the plates for our two cars. He knew all of his friends’ plates, too. Though usually no more than a parlor trick—”hey what were you doing downtown last night?” he could say to someone whose car he saw on the way home—once this came in handy. A family friend called one evening: “What’s the license plate on Pete’s car?” A family emergency had occurred while her husband Pete was driving across the state to Seattle. She needed to tell the state patrol his car’s license plate number so they could find him and tell him to turn around. My father dutifully answered her, and Pete returned home as quickly as possible.

My father easily multiplied two two-digit numbers in his head. I remember an evening when I made him take me to an Amway meeting to see if this would be a way to earn money for college. We both realized quickly this definitely wasn’t for me, but we were too polite to get up and leave because we had sat in the front row. At a certain point the speaker began to illustrate how much money a person could make, citing X number of units on which a person would earn Y amount of profit. Before the speaker could punch all the numbers into his calculator my father piped up with the answer. After a few such examples, the speaker quit trying to use the calculator and just turned to my father for the answer.

Typos and misspelled words irritated him. He couldn’t fathom how a person possibly would fail to see the incorrect pattern. One of his favored word games was printed in the newspaper, buried in the classified ads. (If you’re younger than 40, classifieds were really small type printed at the back of the newspaper and somewhat like Craigslist.) The game was called Jumble and ran for decades; I remember seeing it in the past 20 years. Five (four?) words were jumbled up. Playing the game required one to unjumble the words, then take certain letters indicated by circles and use those to form an answer to a tongue-in-cheek question. “Why the sculptor disappeared”; “He was BUSTED” My father didn’t do these frequently because he instantly saw the words, working more or less like a lexicological hot knife through butter.

He counted everything, knew the patterns and sequences of most common things. If he bought a rack of Presto-logs (his preferred way to burn a fire in the fireplace), he knew soon how many stood in the rack. He knew what day of the week a certain date fell on…27 years ago. He knew how many lightbulbs were on the strands of his Christmas decorative lights, how much he weighed every day, where his stock prices ended yesterday, the number of feet from here to there, and the number of miles he had driven if you asked him point blank in the middle of sun-blasted Nevada. Once we were digging around in his dresser—certainly we weren’t supposed to?—and found a slim memo book small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. It dated from his fraternity days at Washington State College. In it, he had recorded the scores of every single ping pong game he had played against his frat brothers. More interestingly, there were three pages at the end with only the first names of women and a number after them! Since we cannot fathom my father being that much of a ladies man—there had to be three or four dozen names!—we’ve been baffled what the numbers meant. Kisses? Number of dates? Both strain credulity. A rating system? Even more unlikely. He certainly got embarrassed, though, when we made a big deal about it. Maybe…maybe… He never revealed what the numbers meant, but we noted he never threw the notebook away either.

When my family celebrated the gift-giving which happens at birthdays and Christmas, we always laid gifts out on the hearth of the fireplace. When my mother turned 64, her grinning husband led her to the hearth where she found a cubical box wrapped in plain paper. It measured nearly two feet on each dimension. Every face of it had a large numeral “4” drawn on it. Baffled, she looked at him quizzically. My father said, “Well, you’re sixty-four today!” She just scrunched her brows a little bit more. “You know,” he explained, “you’re sixty-four. That’s four cubed!” His grin must have been nearly ear to ear. My mother didn’t share his enthusiasm.

Sadly, I found after his death that his obsession with patterns did not extend to how he kept track of his financial information. Files were in disarray, his migration to using spreadsheets had been less than successful, numerous lists of critical information existed but they contradicted each other, and the trivial received thorough documentation but the important didn’t always. As an example, without understanding what his accounts were and where, I didn’t know for sure how much money my parents had in their investments. Seven years after he died, and one year after my mother had joined him, my brother and I found a certificate of deposit in their safe deposit box. Nothing indicated whether it had been received into their normal cash flow when it matured, or if it might be sitting somewhere waiting to be collected. We never could track down the company which sold it to them, and decided it must have been collected—but 25 years after maturity, the CD paperwork sat in the safety deposit vaults.

When I partially wake at night to stumble toward the bathroom, I idly look at the clock. Instantly, and whether I want to or not, my mind cranks out the amount of time since I turned out the light. I remember all the times I wake to do that or to feed cats, then regurgitate them to my wife in the morning. “Well, I was up at 4:37 feeding the boys.” My father lives in me at those moments. He whispers like a schizoid voice and makes me count the cars I see on a lonely stretch of highway. He makes me frown disapprovingly when I read yet another grammatical error in what passes for our newswriting these days. He laments that I don’t figure my car’s gas mileage, stares in disbelief when I search my brain for my own car’s license plate number, and smiles when I record the amount of rainfall for yesterday. I don’t tell him it’s only because I need to know when to water the yard. And I hope he’s proud of me for all the new ways I’ve used his gift to see the numbers and patterns in quality systems and manufacturing results. He never really said one way or another while he lived.