There are those of us who know, and there are those of us who live life in the dark, as if chained inside the cave of ignorance, not even grasping that the light of knowledge exists just beyond our field of vision. For example: This toddler does not know about eleven.
O, may he one day learn to count above ten and feel the warm rays of comprehension upon his brow!
Two-and-a-half-year-old Grayson Tyler of Seattle, Washington enjoys enumerating toys, grapes, and even his fingers, delighting in his understanding of how many there are, but sadly, he is not enlightened to the vast potential they hold, as he has no idea that there can be eleven. Grayson has a vague understanding that there are numbers that come after ten, but, trapped as he is within his dense chamber of cluelessness, he believes that the next digit may be “ten” again. His parents have mentioned “eleven,” but the piercing brightness of its truth has been too much for Grayson to bear, and he has turned his head away in fear and disgust at the unknown, preferring instead to refer to the eleventh numeral a bastardized number of his own creation called “one-a-teen,” or to skip it all together.
If he cannot escape the cave by his own volition, he must be dragged, for he cannot be kept from double-digit numbers forever!
Grayson’s world is a safe one, but it is shrouded in the dank fog of incomprehension. He cannot understand that his cousin Julie, who is ten, will turn eleven this year, nor that after eleven comes the more shocking and powerful “twelve.” It can be hard to watch a human being, with its powers of logic and deduction, live in the dark as Grayson is, but there will come a time when he will leave the cave and see the light. One day, though it may nearly break him, he will come to know eleven.
