It looks the same upside down and right side up.

On its side, it’s the symbol for infinity.

It’s a power of 2.

It’s a homophone (remember the old joke, Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine.)

It’s a Fibonacci number.

It’s the number of notes in an octave.

It’s the number of planets in the solar system (sorry, Pluto, we still miss you).

It’s the age of my firstborn son. Happy birthday, Ben!

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Several months ago, Ben announced that his bike was “too tippy” and stopped riding. We hadn’t taken the training wheels off, he hadn’t fallen down; something just changed in his thinking about bike riding and he was not to be budged.

So, we haven’t been riding bikes. He sees his friends bike and trike and scoot about, in parks and at playgrounds, with and without training wheels, but Ben’s never been one to bow to peer pressure. He was happy to watch.

Then the other day, as we were driving home past Crissy Field, I suggested that maybe we could go bike riding there again someday. “But my bike is too tippy,” came the expected reply. And I didn’t have an answer different than I’d ever had — “That’s just how bikes are, sweetie, they’re a little tippy, but you don’t fall off”– but somehow that day, it led to more discussion.

“Why can’t bikes have a little wall around the seat, that keeps you from falling off?”

“I don’t think it’d be a bike then, anymore, would it? With a little wall, it’d be more like a car. And besides, you don’t need a little wall to keep you on the seat; you’ve got good balance.”

He fell silent for the rest of the drive home. But when we got home, he said, “Mama, it’s such a nice sunny day, why don’t we ride bikes?”

And we’ve been riding every day since.