_____

John and I agree on this fact: there was never a point when our answer was going to be no.

We have compiled all of the email messages that were exchanged during an almost unbearably long three weeks this past July — from July 5th, when we got the first really substantial information from the social worker for a 12-year-old boy named Vincent, to July 26th, when we met him and welcomed him into our home as our son.

Among all those thousands upon thousands of words, you can read worry, hope, confusion, even an emerging, impossible affection for a child we had never even met face to face. But nowhere will you find the words, “We can’t do this. We shouldn’t do this. Let’s not.”

It’s possible we were just naïve. It’s possible that Vincent will never really learn to trust us or love us as his real, true parents. It’s possible things will go painfully wrong sooner or later. Anything’s possible.

Anything except this: it is not possible that we would say “No, we will not be your parents” — not then, and not ever.

Knowing this and convincing Vincent that it’s true, however, are two quite different matters.

Adoption of an older child is confusing under any circumstances. Adoption of a child who has already been adopted and displaced once before is utterly mind-boggling for parent and child alike.

On our side of the equation, we operate with the knowledge that every promise we make to this child of ours has already been made — and broken — before. What can we possibly say or do to convince him that this time things will be different, that things already are?

That part, we don’t know. We do know that the proving of our commitment to our son will ultimately involve a great deal more doing than saying. Most of the words we’ve used so far — the explanations, reassurances, promises and declarations — have sounded pathetically inadequate, even to our own ears.

To Vincent’s ears, I think it’s possible that “I love you” and “I’m glad I’m your mom” and “You will always be our son” might sound like the wordless, mechanical voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher in the old holiday specials. We say it; he responds automatically. It happens so quickly that it seems unlikely that our words ever made it all the way to his heart before getting pumped back to us. For him, maybe these are just sounds strung together. Just something to say.

Even so, words are what we have immediately at hand, so we need to use them as well as we can.

Last night, in response to a question from him, I tried to explain why, even though I have always written about my kids, I felt reluctant to write about him. He didn’t get what I was trying to say, and neither did I. I was using too many words, and it was getting very mixed up.

So now I will try to make it simple, Vincent, and tell you that for your Pop and me, there was only ever one word for you. It was, “Yes.”

All right, I admit it: I hover. Even worse: I love to hover.

The pejorative term “helicopter parent” seems to have originated among school teachers, who used it to identify parents who were overly involved in their children’s lives. These were the parents who fussed with their child’s costume for 30 minutes before the school play, then shouldered their way to the front row of the auditorium where they could get the best angle for their camcorder. Helicopter parents were an object of dread.

Now that the school play — along with recess — has been eliminated in favor of standardized testing, the term seems to have expanded somewhat in meaning. It now covers everyone from the dad that calls the kid’s college professor to demand his own copy of the syllabus to the mom who not only enrolls her children for music lessons, but even drives them there. Right now, I only fit this latter category, but I’m clearly on the slippery slope.

It’s shameful, I know, but I actually like taking my kids to music lessons. What other line of work allows you to sit reading Newsweek or doing the Sudoku while convincing yourself that you’re fulfilling your job description? Yeah, I dig this helicopter parent gig.

I also like parent-teacher conferences, and volunteering in their classes. Don’t let it get around, but I actually get a secret voyeuristic pleasure observing my kids at work. This is almost certainly a sign that I lack a life, I suspect.

Yes, I know that a really good parent knows when to let go. According to tradition, that’s supposed to happen on the first day of kindergarten, when you slow the car down, toss the kid and the backpack onto the curb, and speed off to work or at least to Starbucks.

Really good parents — the non-hovering kind, I mean — reflect on their own childhood exploits and misadventures and conclude that they lived to tell, and so will their kids.

I suspect this is the root of my own problem: I didn’t have enough childhood exploits. And now I’m passing on that shameful legacy to my offspring. It’s so humiliating. I never ran away from home, set the house on fire, or smoked in the girls’ john, and now my hovering is preventing my children from experiencing fully their own crazy youth.

It’s no excuse to point out that the broader culture actually demands a pretty intense degree of hovering. Kids must be accompanied by parents at all times, whether they are at the library, the corner store, or the buffet restaurant. Get caught violating that rule and someone will call 696-KIDS. Every story of juvenile delinquency is accompanied by the braying of “Where were the parents?” Every newspaper editorial about the negative economic impact of dumb school children jabs the bony finger of blame right into the xiphoid processes of lazy parents who couldn’t be bothered to read to their tots or even just flick through a few lousy flash cards.

Neither can I avoid blame by mentioning that we are surrounded by thousands of examples of children who actually do experience the sort of childhood that helicopter-haters seem to value. It’s not the least bit difficult to find children who have unsupervised adventures for hours every day and night; whose pushy parents aren’t forcing them to practice their violins — or even to brush their teeth; whose school life is so independent that their parents won’t even sign their field trip permission slips much less annoy the teachers with questions about the homework. I think we can all agree that those children are doing just fine without all this relentless hovering.

Nevertheless, I still need to answer for the harm my self-indulgent hovering is doing. The happiness our kids seem to get from knowing that they are safe at the center of their parents’ world is really just a mask for the horrible, nagging insecurity that’s the result of never having rafted down the river like Huck Finn. We owe them that raft! Not only that, we owe our nation the strong, superior citizens that result when kids are compelled to fight their own battles and find their own fun.

I’ve got to go cold turkey; it’s the only way. No more setting aside the bill-paying to play Monopoly with them. My parents never played no stinking Monopoly with me, and I turned out, well, sort of a poor sport. But still! Let these kids amuse themselves by watching endless reruns of Gilligan’s Island, like we did back in my day. No more signing them up for all these lessons, either. If they want to learn to swim, let them fall into Lake Erie; they’ll learn quick enough. And especially, no more interfering at school.

It’s been a guilty pleasure hovering. But now I understand that it’s wrong to cut the crusts off the whole-grain bread of their cage-free turkey breast sandwiches, especially if I then write “I Love You” on them in mustard. A really good parent would make them write their own damn mustard love notes, or go without.

Besides meeting the child or children themselves, many other things are held up, so that the flow of one’s life can be like the water behind the beaver dam.

For example, we realized a while back that we had forgotten to update our will after the birth of our daughter almost nine years ago. We don’t think this would cause serious problems in the event of our untimely demise, but still. One wants to have all of one’s children named as heirs.

It’s already been almost nine years that this has needed doing. Do we go ahead and update the will now, when we may need to add one or two more chilldren any time now?

Our cars are both getting old, and we need to replace them. Now that the kids no longer require hoisting in and out of bulky car seats, I could get a smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicle. But if we have three or four kids, we’ll still need a minivan. Guess we’ll hold on to the van a while longer, until we find out how our lives go.

It’s been too long since we had our family picture taken, or even a portrait of the kids together. I suppose a portrait of how our family looked just before the big change would be good, but I can’t seem to schedule the sitting. It feels like an acknowledgement that we’ve given up on ever getting a placement. It’s only been six months since we got the thumbs up to adopt. Our looks won’t change too much if we wait six months more.

If you clear space in your garden and then don’t plant, nature will cause something to take root there anyway. All those drawers we emptied, the beds we set up, the room we made in our hearts, the time set aside, the mental space cleared — noxious weeds are starting to sprout in those open spaces. Doubts and worries flourish on the ground where children were supposed to grow. And like the black locust seeds now popping up everywhere we look in our back yard, those weeds seem to grow tall and leggy over night.

In the first few months after our family was approved, we were able to fill time with work. Looking through photolistings, checking leads, researching medical and mental health conditions, taking parenting classes. We exhausted ourselves, without moving things forward much. Sysephian indeed, this undertaking. To mix a metaphor even further.

It could still happen any day. The water could flow free, the seed could sprout and grow, the rock could find a resting place at the top of the hill. Maybe it will.

These little kids in the Writers Circle I recently formed at the elementary school, they can tell I am not practicing what I preach. I am not writing every day. I am not brainstorming ideas in my journal. I am not outlining before I write. And that’s why they aren’t doing it either. They’ve got my number.

Writers Circle was never supposed to be about me, of course. It was supposed to be about nurturing their emerging interest and skills, supporting their efforts, encouraging them to practice. It’s not about whether I pre-write, write and revise a blog entry. They don’t need to know that I wait until the day before the deadline almost every month before making a desperate grab at the very first idea for a Plain Press column that enters my head. They are supposed to do as I say.

They do not, these recalcitrant youth.

Actually, to be fair and more accurate, a few of them do. There are one or two good, good children, who listen attentively, then promptly and sincerely apply themselves to following my spoken directions. A cynical artiste might conclude that these are the very children who are the least likely to demonstrate any real flair for writing. How could anyone so organized also be creative? Well, they are. Much of what has been written by these serious-minded students has been silly and fun and graceful and complete. And when you get right down to it, the element of completeness is the part that really matters.

In contrast, let us consider the child who was eager to share her writing as soon as possible, but who — instead of reading from a draft — spoke a sort of summary of her ideas that eventually trailed off into an inconclusive sort of, “Well, you get the picture..” non-ending. This child is a person with good ideas, who knows how to draw upon sensory details to create rich prose poems. But she is having a dickens of a time performing the alchemy that transforms ideas into written words on paper. This is the literary equivalent of the air guitar.

Which makes her a kindred spirit, I guess. I am always a little humiliated when a friend remarks in passing about my being “a writer,” when I produce so little actual writing. It is the same humiliation I felt when my dear friend and mentor Hale Chatfield — who preferred actual writing to creating clever ways to avoid writing — finally got fed up with listening to my sniffling about the difficulties involved in becoming a writer and bellowed impatiently, “Oh, for God’s sake, would you just get on with it? If you want to be a writer, write something! Even a grocery list!”

See, that’s what made Hale a good mentor. Had he wished to, he could have responded to my dillydallying by thrusting a sheaf of coffee-stained ledger paper under my nose and bellowing (he did bellow, and he was also stout and grizzled), “Quit your lollygagging! I’ve drafted this entire chapbook of poems in the time you spent debating whether it was better to write in pencil or pen!”

How can I mentor these little scribes if I’m ordering them to go home and draft an essay about their dream house while I go home, boot up the laptop, and then try to see if I can beat my high score on Tetris?

I cannot — not effectively, at least. I am emitting the effluvium of fruitlessness, and with their keen little noses, they’ve caught that rank scent. Masking that odor over with references to past accomplishments or vague comments on projects I may start someday won’t disguise the fact that right now, this minute, I am staring out the window, petting the cat, or re-reading an email I sent last week because it contained a clever and original turn of phrase.

Many writers of some merit and accomplishment have paused in mid-career to comment on this issue and to offer people like me guidance. I own many books addressing this problem. My patient and encouraging spouse has recently ordered yet another such title from the library, in another unsubtle effort to prod me into productivity.

So much, in fact, has been written and sold on the topic of writer’s block that one wonders whether it is possible to simply create a niche for oneself, specializing in this genre of non-writing. Why should established authors like Eudora Welty and John Gardner get to have the last word on writer’s block? I have been writing about not writing for more than thirty years! I am an expert on the topic!

It could be the answer for me. Daily, disciplined non-writing might at least allow me to dispel this redolence of failure. I could establish a goal of 1000 words of non-writing daily. For all appearances, I would be productive. I could walk into Writers Circle like the confident, confident, dry and secure women in the deodorant commercial. I could call out, “Who has written something today?” and thrust my own hand high in the air above their unknowing little noggins.

Nevertheless, I find it hard to argue with a lot of his views on Cleveland’s education woes. In today’s piece, predictably titled “Schools Won’t Get What They Need,” O’Brien once again lambastes both the broken educational system and the dysfunctional community that engendered it. In a Barlett’s-quality aphorism, he quips sardonically: “Success may breed success, but it can’t match failure’s fertility.” Ain’t that the sorry truth?

So here I was this afternoon, making my way with weary resignation through his editorial, when, with only fifty words or so to go O’Brien finally offered something against which I could indignantly rail.

“Cleveland needs a radical, new idea — probably something involving long school days, short summer vacations, dormitories and work-study jobs.”

Of course. What Cleveland needs is a return to that style of quasi-prison schools depicted in Dickens novels. We don’t need no stinking Bill Denihan. We need Wackford Squeers!

Even if O’Brien’s train of thought had not been pulling into the station at that point, I would have jumped anyway. Because one thing my public school children definitely do not need is more public school.

I say this with the most sincere respect to all of the public school teachers and administrators who have gone out of their way to accommodate my children’s needs. And I even grudgingly concur with O’Brien’s implied assessment that there are children whose parents are so disinclined or ill-prepared to parent competently that their children would be safer and more enriched if they were in someone else’s care for a large part of their days and years.

But even O’Brien acknowledges that there are also children in the schools who are motivated and supported. They may not represent a majority in most schools, but they are present in some number everywhere. For the moment. If there is one sure way to extinguish the spark of genius that they represent, it would be to sentence them to even more protracted institutionalization. Even if some factory standard could be achieved by controlling most of the variables in children’s lives, it would mean that we’d need to be satisfied with merely flattening the curve — eliminating the highs as well as the lows.

We do need “a radical new idea.” But if that idea further separates children who are eager to learn from the families that are eager to teach, then it may be radical and new, but still really, really wrong.

Yesterday, the kids and I were making a whirlwind stop at the grocery store, between school and swimming lessons. Now, for our kids, there’s something about being in a store that is sort of like being stuck together in the backseat of the car for a long drive. Without access to other approved amusements, Ned and Audrey will pull out all of their creative stops. Hilarity ensues as they construct some game or other that, while annoying to nearby adults, keeps the two of them in stitches until they are released from the boring environment.

That’s pretty much what was going on: the two of them were giggling, intermittently obstructing the aisles as they fooled around, and generally getting very close to my last nerve. And then, all of the sudden, as I chose a loaf of bread and prepared to dash for the check-out, Audrey paused to catch her breath and said, “At school, I am a lump. But at home I am completely different.”

As was the case when she asked me, “Mom, what is abortion, exactly?” as I was merging into heavy traffic on I-90, I was unable to give her words the immediate attention they deserved. But I did stop to ask her what it meant to be a lump, a term I would never in my life have applied to my vibrant, funny girl.

“Well, I’m not special. I’m just a person in my class. That’s not how it is at home.”

First, it needs to be said that, from everything I’ve observed, Audrey is far from being “just a person in her class.” It may be true — I hope it’s true — that her teachers offer equal attention and affection to all the children. That’s the way it ought to be, anyway. But she’s hardly a wallflower. So what could it mean, to be a “lump”?

Ideally, I’d be able to sit her down and ask her to tell me more about what she meant. But the same emotional intelligence that causes her to make these comments in the first place also allows her to detect when her mother is making more of something than she thinks it deserves, at which point she clams up. So it’s left to my imagination to ponder it out.

The conclusion I’ve decided to live with is that she feels her specialness to be somewhat neutralized in the institutional confines of school. I suppose this is what cynical people mean when they say, with a certain measure of unbecoming triumph, “Welcome to the real world.”

I’m all for recognizing the real world, I guess, but I was also hoping that we’d somehow create a glowing sphere around our kids that would be fully portable and impenetrable, though transparent — a layer of insulation from hard knocks.

Just now, as the kids and I were chatting about their school day over fried pierogies and baked beans, Ned looked down at his plate and said, “Mama, I see the face of the Buddha.”

Sure enough, there on his plate, was a clear image of the Buddha in old age, with his eyes closed, placidly existing in a little puddle of ketchup.

“What do I do?” Ned asked.

I wasn’t sure. We decided to look up the Buddha’s last words, since the image looked old and peaceful to us.

“It says here, ‘Work hard to gain your own salvation,’” I told Ned.

We thought about that.

“But what do I do with this ketchup?” he wanted to know.

I told him to rinse it gently down the disposal, then get to work on that salvation part.

If you have considered tutoring adults, need to earn your GED, or just want to improve your basic academic skills, I really encourage you to check out this program. It’s a comfortable environment where tutors and students are well-supported and have access to excellent resources.]

I remember when I really learned.

I remember the summer day when my mother taught me to iron shirts. She lowered the ironing board so that I could reach it, then stood beside me with one hand in the middle of my back and the other hand hovering over the shirt, ready to snatch back the hot iron before I pressed my own fingers.

I remember 10th-grade lunch hours spent with Mr. Hyde, my good and generous geometry teacher. I remember him eating his lunch from a paper bag while I learned what I could not learn in class. I remember him setting aside the book that confused me, and just working the problem on the chalkboard, explaining every step.

I remember the empty parking lot where I learned to drive a stick shift. I remember my husband’s calm voice as I ground the gears, assuring me that the transmission could almost certainly withstand this punishment.

I also remember all the times I really didn’t learn.

I remember splitting up the chemistry homework among several other lazy classmates and then sharing the answers, so that none of us needed to do the whole assignment. Not surprisingly, none of us went on to careers as chemists or pharmacists. Thank goodness.

I remember lectures in high school, college and graduate school when I would pinch my own earlobes or pull my own hair just to stay awake. I remember the drone of the professor’s voice, but none of the words.

I also remember reading over and over the same two paragraphs of my history assignment, until the back-and-forth motion of my eyes over the text put me into a state of self-hypnosis.

That’s why I tutor.

My moments of real learning have important elements in common: they all involved just one student and one teacher, an emphasis on demonstration rather than on text, and an understanding that I would not suffer if I made a mistake. That pretty much sums up the approach taken at Seeds of Literacy.

I believe if there was a well-matched tutor for every kid now enrolled in school, there would be a drop-out rate approaching zero. For this reason, I am especially happy when a student tells me about doing her Seeds homework alongside her children. I know that I am not only helping that student work toward her GED, I am teaching her to teach. While she is still a student, she is also a tutor to her own children.

Her children will remember those evenings at the kitchen table, when their mom taught a lesson for them alone, as clearly as I can remember my mother’s old cotton housedress, the clean smell of a freshly-pressed shirt, and the warmth of her hand in the middle of my back.

Some of what I hear in tutor talk is eye-opening, as when another tutor demonstrated “partial quotient division,” a method of doing long division that is especially useful when you have divisors that are more than a single digit. I rarely use any other method for long-division any more.

But of course, some tutor talk is, if not complete hooey, at least debatable.

Such was the nature of the aforementioned discussion. A former math teacher — a swell, soft-spoken guy — was commenting with much regret on the inability of modern children to do math in their heads. I begged to differ.

This is a topic that pops up at our house regularly. My husband, John, is a mental mathematician. And although I’m sure he doesn’t mean to, he occasionally reacts just a little scornfully when he observes me demonstrating to our kids how to write out, in detail, a math process. “Just do it in your head!” he cries. “Break it down! Do the hundreds place first, then the tens, put it all together in your brain!

Show off.

Now, I’m not debating that mental math is impressive. For people who can’t do it, mental math seems magical. I’ve gotten books out of the library, to see if I could teach myself to do what John can do without apparent effort. And I’ll even concede that if each and every American could find square roots without relying on fingers and toes, ours would be a stronger, more productive nation.

But I do contest the suggestion that mental math is more important than math done “by hand.” Moreover, based on the people I’ve met who are working toward a GED, I am increasingly of the opinion that an emphasis on “doing it in your head” can interfere with the much more valuable process of helping students get cozy with math.

That coziness — a comfort with math that is similar to the pleasure we get from doing a word search, a crossword puzzle, or a Sudoku — strikes me as much more important than skill at mental computation, or even speed. In observing both adults and children doing math, I’ve seen that the students most likely to quit in frustration were the ones who were trying to skip steps, rush through the problem, hide their hand-counting, or jump to conclusions.

Meanwhile, another student who copies out the whole equation, neatly stacks her numbers one above the other, uses counters or other visuals — that student may spend twice as much time on the lesson. Of course, she may also attempt half as many problems, but more of them are correct at the end. Through the writing, even the counting on her hands, she gets to watch the problem unfold in some physical way before her eyes, revealing what Nobel laureate Richard Feynman meant when he spoke of the beauty of the language of nature.

There is, I concede, one aspect of mental math whose value is pretty clear. Mastery of the basic, single-digit arithmetic facts is essential if the rest of math’s beauties are to be experienced. I have encouraged our kids to get the single-digit facts for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division cemented into their heads as quickly as possible. While some mnemonics and hand-counting rituals are themselves impressive and interesting (such as the “nines trick” Edward James Olmos demonstrated in “Stand and Deliver), spending too much time on basic computation puts the student off track, and slows his approach to the really fun stuff.

Who knows how many would-be mathematicians where nipped in the bud when they were shamed by their reliance on hands and pencil? I am no math whiz, myself, though I have come to love algebra and especially geometry. I dropped out of high school math classes in trigonometry and calculus in order to protect my GPA. Part of my math fear had to do with my embarrassment that a few of my classmates seemed to be able to skip large chunks of the problems, apparently pulling correct conclusions from thin air. Even if I could eventually produce the same answer, I understood that there was something inferior about my method.

It’s that assumption of superiority that I think has no place in math instruction at either the elementary or high school level. In fact, it should probably be the other way around. “Just knowing” is very nice, but being able to prove your knowledge — in writing — is more important, and much more scientific.

It wasn’t that I am cowardly about getting my blood drawn. After two pregnancies and the wide array of tests I endured when I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1993, a little cholesterol check is a cake walk.

And I also have plenty to motivate me to keep track of how things are going with my bloodstream. In 1987, my father died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the age of 56. He had a number of risk factors, many of which I don’t share. But the closer I get to 56 myself, the younger that age seems to me — and the more pressing the need to do what I can to make sure I’m not headed in the same direction.

So last Friday, I finally listened to my own internal nagging and spent the measly 40 minutes it required to walk to the hospital, register, visit the friendly phlebotomist, and walk home.

The nag-that-trumped-all-nags — the one that finally got me off my hinder and on the way to Lutheran — was this realization: “Neglecting my health is negligent parenting.”

Which it is. John and I have read and studied a lot about negligent parenting over the past year of our adoption prep, so I don’t use the term lightly. Discarding all the flippant uses of this term — as when we say parents are negligent when they feed their kids cheese or hamburger — negligent parents fail to provide their children with the basic essentials of a healthy life: food, safe shelter, social contact, education.

In that sense, what essential could be more basic than the parent herself? What does it mean when I take my children in for regular well-child visits to the pediatrician, but don’t get around to scheduling a checkup for myself even once every two or three years? Sounds like I’m saying my kids’ health is more precious and worth monitoring than my own.

Many parents I know are modest people, so it’s difficult for them to look at themselves — their corporal persons — as their children’s most valuable resource. If you are one of those self-sacrificing mamas or papas who always puts everyone else’s needs before your own, I’d like to send a special Valentine message to you: Get Over It.

Okay, enough flogging that issue. Schedule your check-up, get your mammogram and, for heaven’s sake, check your heart disease risk factors.

And now, a little fun:

One way we try to minimize empty calories and fat in our family’s diet is to link certain foods to healthier actions. Example: potato chips are (usually) only eaten after we’ve done an afternoon of yard work. No ice cream in the summer except after a bike ride. Our idea is that until we’re ready to totally give up some of these favorite foods, we will at least make them harder to get. Maybe the extra thought and planning required to get them will help us remember to make them only a very small part of our diet.

So for Valentine’s Day this morning, I hid the candy, and gave both of my kids and my husband, John, a page of number questions to solve in order to crack a code to reveal the candy’s secret location. Finding the answers required lots of math, plus some research skills involving history. The kids were still working on their puzzles as they got on the bus, so we avoided sending them to school already carbo-loaded. Maybe they’ll even learn something on one of the year’s most distracting school days.

Here’s a sample of some of their questions, drawn from all three puzzles. Find the letter that corresponds to your numerical answer. When read in order, the letters spell a message. Crack the code and do what it says.

• Phone number for a penguin, the Fonz, or a guy who drives an ice cream truck?
• A scientist who did invent an early mechanical calculator (but did not invent the programming language that bears his name) died when he was this old.
• If you start practicing your violin at 7:26AM and end at 8:05AM, how many minutes did you practice?
• 960 + (304 “squared”) – (872 x 361) + “five million” – GIGSIS. (Hint: for “gigsis,” think about the eleventh question, below.)
• After today (Valentine’s Day), how many days are left in 2006?
• The sum of all the interior angles in a triangle always equals this number.
• 3841?2756
• How many babies in a set of quintuplets?
• In what year did Cleveland, Ohio celebrate its sesquicentennial?
• When you make an “about face,” how many degrees do you turn?
• This number means “Hi there!” to a calculator.
• How many Japanese warriors does it take to make a sushi-western?
• Square root of the number of possible outcomes of a roll of six dice.
• Two days from now, without the punctuation.
• The slope of a line with coordinates (-5, -6) and (-2, 15). (Don’t just try to plot this and guess like John did, because he was too proud to look up the formula. More on the questionable superiority of “mental math” tomorrow…)
• MCXLVII times V plus 20K equals ?
• The year before Caracalla’s fatal bathroom break.
• (Discovery year, sort of) + (3-digit palindrome number whose digits add up to an unlucky number)

Letters corresponding to the numerical answers:

A = 0.7734; B = 334; C = 8; D = 47; E = 180; F = 199; G = 4,262,665; H = 1946; I = 0.6644; J = 24,382; K = -6; L = 320; M = 13; N = 41; O = 39; P = 32,001; Q = 3,861,058; R = 7; S = 5,381,214; T = 216; U = 25,735; V = 1897; W = 1951; X = 254; Y = 90; Z = 0.873; (blank space between words) = 9; “ (i.e. quotation marks) = 5