November 12, 2026
At 7:24 I asked what eleven divided by twelve was. I was told it was about 0.9167. That would have done the job if I had been measuring a board, but I got hung up on the word “about.” I asked whether that meant the sixes went on forever. They do. The seven comes from rounding. The six keeps its job as long as there are decimal places to fill, which is a better employment arrangement than most of us can expect.
Yesterday was November 11. Today is November 12. I had spent some of yesterday trying to get eleven Captain’s Logs in order, so I had eleven on the brain. Turning the calendar over gave me twelve. Dividing one by the other was a small thing to do before the coffee got cold. I expected an answer I could hold in my head. I got one I could begin saying and never finish.
There’s a pencil-and-paper reason for it. Eleven divided by twelve starts with a nine in the tenths place and a one in the hundredths. Then you bring down a zero, divide eighty by twelve, and get six with eight left over. Bring down another zero and you’re back at eighty. You can sharpen the pencil, change chairs, or come back tomorrow. There will still be eight left over. The repetition is built into the division.
I like that the shortest way to write the whole thing is the one I started with. Eleven over twelve. Two numbers and a line between them. You could fill a notebook with sixes and still need another notebook. The fraction fits on the back of a receipt. For a man who has spent part of the week trying to get a story down to seven hundred and seventy-seven words, this seems like information I should have received sooner.
While putting the logs in order, I kept running into a question the calculator never has to answer. What can I leave out and still tell the truth? A room can take a paragraph to describe, and all the reader needs to know is who was in it. Sometimes the thing that belongs is a sentence somebody said on the way out. Cut that sentence and you can still have the right date, the right place, and every person accounted for. You can also leave the reader with the wrong idea about what happened.
I have done that in conversation. I have said “about a week” when I knew the day and could probably have told you what time it was. Sometimes the day truly didn’t matter. Sometimes I wanted to hurry past the part I remembered best. I can hear the difference when I say it out loud, especially if somebody who was there is sitting across from me. They have their own detail that never made it into my account. I try to let them finish.
There’s room for “about.” If you ask me when I’ll be there and I say about ten, you have all the information I can reasonably offer you. There may be a freight train. I may have gone back inside for my keys. I may, in an impressive feat of preparation, be looking for the keys while holding them. A precise arrival time would make the answer sound more official. It would do very little for the person waiting on the porch.
The first eleven logs have endings because I had to stop writing somewhere. The people in them went on with their lives when I closed the file. I went on with mine. I can finish telling you what I remember about a particular morning. I can leave myself room to hear what somebody else remembers when they get around to telling it. That seems like a fair use of a new page.
So here is what I have for Thursday morning. Eleven divided by twelve is zero point nine one, with six repeating. If I need four decimal places, I’ll write 0.9167 and get on with measuring the board. Today I think I’ll write 11/12 at the top of the page. It leaves me enough room to set down what happened this morning, including the question I asked after I thought I already had the answer. The coffee can go in the microwave.
I keep coming back to Paul’s word “now.” I used to hurry past it to get to “face to face.” This morning I can stay with “now” for a minute. There’s a great deal I would like to understand, and there is still a day to live with the understanding I have. I can start with that.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)
