Counting Descent

“Counting Descent” is full of numbers that quantify different aspects of the family history as it is told. Some of these figures are ordinary, expected features of certain facts. It’s fairly standard for the speaker to quantify how many aunts and uncles or siblings he has, and how many boys and girls there are in that number. The fact that his grandparents moved once across the Mason-Dixon line is crucial to the story because it gives the reader more information about their geography. The length of the speaker’s parents’ marriage and the age of his sister also give the reader useful information by giving them an impression of how old the speaker is.

Other figures are more specific than they need to be for the reader to understand the story. The speaker tells the reader that he and his siblings live “1,517 miles apart” (Line 30). This number is large enough that the tens place or the ones could have been rounded and the reader would still have a fairly accurate impression of the distance. The same goes for how long the speaker’s mother was in labor: “twelve hours, forty-three minutes” (Line 31) is needlessly precise. By including these extraneous details, the reader demonstrates his care for the topic at hand.