From the Novel Call It In the Air
Calculating the Days
By: Gregory Light - Jun 18, 2026
(Ottawa, Canada 1962)
To Joey, barely eleven years old in 1962, flipping a penny one million times did not seem an unreasonable task. He wasn't sure how big it was—he knew it was big—but it was a number he'd heard people use in connection with lots of things, so it had to have an end. Some people, like Diane's father, even made a million dollars in one year. "My father's a millionaire," she would announce every so often, to keep the other kids on their toes. She used it to settle schoolyard disputes with other kids; no matter what they were talking about. As an ultimate measure for being right, a million dollars was indisputable.
The important thing to Joey was that somebody could have one million of something. Because he was determined to have at least a million flips of his penny. It seemed the only way to prove that the "crap" Uncle Frederick came up with was just that, "crap". 'I mean,' Joey said to himself, 'some of it is totally stupid.'
The first thing he had to do was calculate how long it would take. He wanted to get it done quickly to have the "proof" as soon as possible. His first calculations assumed he could flip the coin at least once a second. That seemed a fair estimate, but to be extra sure, and to make the calculations easier, he figured maybe fifty flips in a minute was reasonable. That meant he could flip it one hundred times in two minutes. And when he realized that meant he could go through a thousand in just twenty minutes, the venture suddenly became truly exciting. 'I can probably get them all finished in one day?' he thought. Next weekend would be the best time. It would waste a whole Saturday, but it was worth it. Maybe he'd even ask Gary to help him so that he could play baseball in the afternoon. To double-check, the next morning he asked his father what a million divided by fifty was.
'You should have done your homework last night, Joey.' His father looked at him sternly.
'This isn't homework, Dad. They never give you questions with a million in them. Just in the hundreds.'
'Are you sure?' His father looked sceptical. It was exactly the kind of look that made Joey wonder about adults. "I mean a million." What did his father think kids were today, computers or something? Even his father, he sadly concluded, walked around in the kind of mind fog (Joey and Gary called it) which made adults say the stupidest things to kids. He wondered if it was a universal fact; whether the mind got blinder and deafer as you got older. If he had any major worries about growing up, catching mind fog was at the top of the list. Once, when Gary accused him of showing signs of it, he had chased him across the schoolyard; and would have caught him, too, if the bell hadn't rung.
'You're a real fred,' Joey said indignantly to Gary in line.'
'What's that?' said Marlene who was standing behind Joey.
'He said he likes you a lot, Marlene,' intercepted Gary, giggling. He couldn't figure out why Joey was so upset. Marlene blushed; turned beet red. 'She likes you, too, Joey. Look!'
'I do not,' Marlene said quietly.
'Then why did you go so— OWW!!' Joey pinched Gary hard.
'Quiet back there in line!' shouted, Miss Grant and the line started to file back into the school.
Miss Grant was Joey's favourite teacher. She would shout at them, but he suspected it was to impress the other teachers. She seemed to sense a lot of things the other teachers didn't sense. She was like Sarah in this respect; and like Sarah, gave strength to Joey's theory that adults don't necessarily have to suffer from ‘mind fog’. He knew that he could always talk to Miss Grant if he had a problem. Like now. He knew that if his father didn't tell him what a million divided by fifty was, he could ask Miss Grant.
'Sure, I'm sure it's not homework, Dad. I should know.' It wasn't worth knowing if he had to go through this every time he asked a question. 'You don't have to tell me. If you don't know, I can ask Miss Grant.'
'I know the answer, Joey.' His father also knew that he had walked into a trap that children sometimes set to play on parental pride. He knew it but he couldn't help tumbling into it. 'One million divided by fifty. Let's see.' Joey could see this was going to take hours. And his father was going to make a big deal out of doing it, and then Joey would have to make a big deal out of how proud he was of his father. He wondered how parents managed to manipulate their children into doing that. He secretly suspected that was why parents had children in the first place: to have someone be proud of them. Even if they got the answer wrong. And the way his father was going about it, Joey was certain the answer wasn't even going to be close. 'If I were to solve it,' his father continued. Joey detested it when his father went on like this. He sounded like Frederick. After all, Joey thought, he is solving it, so why the "if"? 'I'd say a million divided by fifty was like five hundred thousand by—no, two million by a hundred. That's it. And that's easy. Subtract two zeros from two million. That's ... twenty thousand. Yes, twenty thousand.'
The answer struck Joey as highly suspect. How you could take two zeros away from two million and get twenty thousand was a trick he hadn't learned in arithmetic yet. Maybe it just was with big numbers, he thought, giving his father the benefit of a very wobbly doubt.
"Gee, thanks, Dad. I never would have figured that out. Not in a million years." His father suitably rewarded, he ran out the door and cycled to school. Later in the afternoon, he asked Miss Grant what she thought the answer was. He needed to know for sure. Miss Grant sat down with pen and paper and looked altogether more professional, stroking out digits and underlining others in the long divisional form; demonstrating to Joey that the answer was twenty thousand. He felt confident it was right.
'What did you want to know for?' she asked him.
'Oh, it's for this project I'm kind of doing,' he said, not wanting to go into it.
'Well, good luck with it.' Miss Grant said and let it drop. That was one of the things he liked about her. She didn't pry. When he looked at her, he got an idea of what people meant when they told him that one day, he'd find girls interesting. But then Miss Grant was different. Certainly, different from Marlene who had been giving him funny looks in class ever since that day in line. Gary thought it was funny until Joey warned him that if he laughed about it again, he would get Julie to give him looks like that. Julie was not pretty at all, short and plump with manacle-like braces. Gary stopped immediately.
Twenty thousand minutes was more than Joey had expected. A lot more. Unlike a second, a minute was a definite length of time. You had to wait for it to pass. He had been sent out into the hall for whispering in class once and although it had only been for five minutes, it felt like hours. If five minutes had passed so slowly what were twenty thousand of them going to be like? The idea was numbing. It'd certainly take him longer than Saturday morning, even with Gary's help. It was so depressing he considered giving up the project and might have if Uncle Frederick's grinning, gloating face hadn't seized that moment to flash across his mind. Spurred, he sat down and painstakingly calculated how many minutes there were in a day. The answer surprised him. There were well over a thousand minutes in a day. It followed, then, that it wouldn't take him much longer than three weeks. Later he realized that accounting for sleep, it could be over a month. And with school and his paper route? Well, okay, even longer. But now the increased time persuaded him that the project was that much more important and strengthened his resolve further. Anyway, it couldn't take much more than two months and since the summer holidays were coming, he'd have lots of time. He also decided not to ask Gary to help him. Gary might make mistakes and he had to be sure exactly how many heads and how many tails turned up. He didn't want Uncle Frederick complaining that there were mistakes he couldn't account for.
In the months leading up to the summer holidays, Joey was cautious about how he flipped his penny. He took his time, watching intently as the two sides of the coin rolled over one another in the air. He tried to guess the outcome of the early results but gave up when no pattern emerged. He was more concerned with finding a time-saving method of tossing the coin and noting its result. Although he realized he had to be careful. He had been stung before by calculations. Notably, the day after his birthday when he told Gary that with his new bike, he could cut the time it took him to do his paper route in half. That "calculation" had led to all kinds of unforeseen "events" which he wished had not happened.
'No way you can cut the time in half, Joey,' Gary had replied. 'You still have to load them all on your bike. That's going to take the same amount of time. And you still have to slow down and coast when you throw them. And what about those you stop and put in the mailboxes? And what about Mrs. Anderson? She even gets mad if you don't ring her doorbell and tell her you've left it.'
Joey shrugged. Mrs. Anderson was the biggest thorn in his whole route. He wished he had never traded for her with Gary. He'd only done it because Gary said she tipped "really good" at Christmas. It was months after Christmas, and he hadn't even seen a "really bad" tip. He figured she was still mad at him for the very first time he'd delivered her paper when he'd thrown it from his bike going about fifteen miles an hour. It had only missed her step by a few feet which, for the distance and speed, wasn't bad at all. But it happened to land in a fresh pile of dog "stuff"; in fact, it hit her yapping mongrel, Tippy, as he was finishing. If that wasn’t bad enough, the stupid mutt was so startled, he fell back and rolled over onto the front page of the newspaper?which just happened to feature a large colour photograph of President Kennedy?and scurried, whimpering, under a bush. To make matters worse, Mrs. Anderson, widow of just three years, was one of those weird Catholic Canadians who regarded the young American President as their leader too, and an excrement-smeared photo of him was akin to blasphemy. Joey hadn't waited around to see what the final score was. He whipped his bike into top gear and raced away. When he collected money from her two days later, he tried pretending that he hadn't delivered the paper that day.
'Don't lie to me, young man. I saw your red jacket.' Mrs. Anderson was in no mood for evasive answers. She even showed him the photograph: Kennedy at his least regal.
'Looks like a beard,' Joey said meekly.
'I'll cancel my subscription if it happens again,' she warned him. And she glared at him, a shrewish fixed stare, as he walked back down the path to his bike.
'I don't care if that grouch, Mrs. Anderson, does cancel her subscription,' Joey told Gary months later. 'I hope she does. I'll still have more papers than you and I can finish delivering them all before you finish yours.' He regretted saying it the moment the first syllable left his mouth. He had never finished before Gary. Not once. His excuse was always that Gary had a three-speed. Now he didn't have that excuse and to make things worse Gary wanted to bet money.
'I don't want to bet.' Joey mumbled.
'Why not? You chicken?'
'I'm not chicken,' he said. 'It's just that my mom says I'm not supposed to bet.'
'Yeah, sure. You're just trying to get out of it.'
'No, I'm not,' Joey shouted, and cycled off.