Birds of a feather

I like to think of myself as a curious person, but that’s only true in certain contexts. For example, I’m not especially keen to explore the intricacies of my own home, much less the homes of others.

This isn’t just indifference borne of parental preoccupations. When I was childless, when I visited my childhood home in Vermont, my mom would engage me in the game of “What has changed since Greg’s last visit?” I rarely perceived any alterations more subtle than the addition or subtraction of a floor. Even a new painting might go unnoticed unless it was jarringly weird.

Given that background, you can be sure that, when I say that the rental house we stayed in earlier this week was odd, it really was odd. There were antlers, there were old cameras, there were boxed figurines of saints, there were old issues of Esquire magazine….

Of all the curiosities the house had to offer, I felt most drawn to the one below.

In one sense, this barely even qualifies as a curiosity. It’s just an interior wall decorated with birds on cards numbered from 1 to 52 — perhaps one for each week of the year.

If you look carefully, though, you can tell that something is off. The final number, 52, is not divisible by 3, yet the cards are clearly arranged into three rows of equal length. Relatedly, the final numbers of each row — 18, 35, and 52 — do not represent equal intervals. What’s going on?

This may not strike the average person as a great mystery worth getting to the bottom of. Nonetheless, three of the four adults in our party (including one of this blog’s six regular readers!) independently noticed these numerical anomalies and studied the cards further until arriving at an explanation.*

If this quasi-puzzle seems like the sort of thing you’d enjoy pondering — even at the expense of the time available to read the March 1950 issue of Esquire — you might well be someone I have, or would want to have, as a friend or family member.

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*The patterns of numbers are explainable by the fact that bird #12 is missing.