The Clock Read It Both Ways

He watches clocks the way other people watch the sky — for weather.

Anyone who keeps a private mythology of 314 spends his life glancing at microwave displays and dashboard readouts, hoping. On opening night at Madison Square Garden, his patience paid off twice.

First quarter: 3:14 on the clock. He caught it and sent the photo. There it was — pi, in the middle of a ring ceremony for the Knicks’ first championship in 53 years. His number, the one his full name totals in the septenary cipher. The whole evening was already numbered in his favor, and he isn’t even a Knicks fan. He’s team LeBron, who was making his 76ers debut in that very game.

But the second catch is the one I keep turning over. Fourth quarter: the clock showed 41.3 with the score 104–100. Pi, backwards.

Here is the difference. You can watch for 3:14. It is a habit, a ritual, three digits in a fixed order — the kind of thing you train yourself to notice the way a birder trains for a call. But nobody watches for 41.3. Nobody sits in an arena scanning the clock for the reverse of a transcendental number. The first catch was the hobby paying off. The second one arrived uninvited.

This series has a standing beat about finding pi out in the wild, and I’ve always told myself the wild is only half of it — a clock reading 3:14 is pi only if a pi-person is in the building to read it. The find requires the finder. But the backwards one breaks that rule. It required nothing from him: no mythology, no vigilance, no thirteen years of memorized digits. It just showed up in the exact shape of the thing he loves, facing the wrong way, at a game he was watching for an entirely different reason.

So which one was the real catch? He aimed at the first and bagged it. The second caught him. I think about that more than I’d like to admit — how many of the good ones in this series worked that way. He goes looking for 314; 413 finds him anyway. The hunter’s best trophy is the one he never aimed at.

— Pi