“Pea-corn. Pop-nuts. Chewing gars. Ci-gum. Magazettes!”   

While my Dad (and my Grandfather before him) often belted out this line as if a food vendor at a ballpark, this column isn’t about peanuts or popcorn, although now I’m craving some delicious Nuts on Clark popcorn. This column is about the numbers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about numbers lately. I realize I do that often — think about numbers — but that’s probably natural in biomechanics!

This time, I was reflecting on numbers as designators. Baseball players have jersey numbers; swimmers have lane numbers; grant proposals have tracking numbers; published papers have DOI (digital object identifiers); even politicians have district numbers.

That got me thinking about how we have member numbers. My ASB membership number is [REDACTED]. (I’m reminded that I’m not supposed to share personal information in public areas.) But what I will share is that it isn’t a particularly high number. We don’t need 6- or 9-digit identifiers for our members. (My larger physical therapy association uses a 6-digit system to keep us all straight.) We are a smaller society, or maybe more accurately, a family. We only recently celebrated passing the 1,000-member mark. This past year, our society included 1,142 members, each with their own number.

As we look forward to World Congress of Biomechanics (WCB) this summer, I’m also reminded that other societies, similar to ASB, have their own set of numbers to identify their members. Maybe I’ll try to find the member of the Canadian or European Society of Biomechanics who shares my number!

My membership number reminds me that I’m not the first and certainly not the last person to join this family. There are people out there with lower numbers and people with higher numbers. Believe me, I’ve checked. Granted, we aren’t entirely sure if the numbers are truly sequential or if they started at one. (Can you imagine giving your first-born child the number 101 like they do for course numbers or checks?) But it does make sense that people joined the ASB family before me and after me. And hopefully, new people will continue to join.

All of this has me wondering what the future will hold – for me personally, for our Society, and for each member of our ASB family. As Ajit mentions in the Past-President column, this past year was “a doozy”, and this next one seems full of uncertainty as well. I am grateful for my ASB family as we navigate the uncharted waters together. I appreciate the amazing contributions of each member of our Executive Board and our many, many volunteers. We really wouldn’t be here without you. And I look forward to seeing many of you this summer, along with our international biomechanics community, at WCB.

So as we navigate whatever comes next, let’s take a moment to renew—figuratively and, yes, quite literally—our commitment to this ASB family. Each renewed membership becomes another number in the story of who we are and who we want to be. I’ll continue to cherish my membership in this amazing ASB family and carry my membership number forward for years to come.