Week 3 Theme 3

Write a theme about an early experience of sound.

I met Integer when he was learning how to ride a bike. Integer. It doesn’t roll off the tongue easily. It doesn’t shout well, and even the little kid that I was realized that “Integer” wasn’t something people said much. “Lucy!” Maybe. She was another friend. But you could never shout “Integer!”

I only knew him as the neighborhood kid. We’d ride bikes around the Lagoon, which sounded Spanish to me, because English words don’t sound like that. No, we didn’t live by the lake, we lived by a lagoon, a fancy way to say lake. Or maybe it was a lake with apartments built around it, because all of the lakes I saw had trees around them.

On the other side of the apartments, there was a boulevard, spelled B-L-V-D. Boulevard, like a big street. To get home from school, we’d have to take a you-turn on the BLVD. And every day, without fail, Integer and I would meet by my patio (the room that was missing a wall) in front of the lagoon with our bikes, and we’d ride around in the park.

I don’t think my parents ever told me what Integer meant. They taught me decimals later, on Christmas, and then they said that Integer wasn’t a decimal. Well, yeah, I could’ve told you that. What did Integer have to do with numbers?