Goines On: Casting out 9s

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In the hours after Goines’ muse reminded him of the “casting out 9s” method of double-checking arithmetic calculations, he remembered where and when he had first heard of the method. Because Goines had been his high school’s “bright boy,” his math teacher (and the schools future principal), Mr. Loren Court, invited him to attend a teachers’ retreat in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas during the summer break of 1959.
    Goines had of course gone, and he could almost remember Mr. Court’s introducing him to the visiting speaker, Dr. [something pronounced Al-kyre], a professor of education somewhere in the valley. Goines felt a flutter of the pride he must have enjoyed on the occasion, and a sense of gratitude for being able to remember it.
    In an evening lecture during the retreat, Dr. “Alkyre” had talked about casting out 9s, and Goines had used it many times since – for example, while toting up incomes and withholdings for his income tax returns.
    When Goines calculated how many years earlier Dr. “Alkyre” had talked about casting out 9s (63), he smiled at the observation that 63 was as no years at all, given that 6 + 3 = 9, and 9 could be cast out.
    His muse had suggested casting out 9s as a response to Goines’ conversation with his son the day before about using license plates as cues for writing haiku-like poems where a license plate’s letters would prescribe the letters with which to begin the three lines, and its digits how many syllables to include in each line. Zero had been a problem, obviously, for a line with no syllables was no line at all.
    Voilá! Make that 0 a 9!
    As a bonus, his son’s suggestion for poetic diversion showed Goines a way to renew his own, failed license-plate challenge of a few months earlier, which had stumped him into giving up altogether.
    He had told his son-in-law he’d write a poem about the license plate on his company car: “UBT108.” Goines’ tack had been to convert the digits into their equivalents according to the “mnemonic major system”:

1 = t, d , th
0 = s, soft c, z, x (in xylophone)
8 = f, ph (in phone), v, gh (as sounded in laugh)

    Applying the mnemonic could transform “UBT108” into “UBTTZV” or “UBTDSF,” for example. He remembered that he had attempted to find meaningful phrasings using consecutive sequences of letters from some of the resulting license numbers – like “Be The Driver!” “Do Something Fun!,” but he had discarded his notes, and he thought that was just as well. They were better forgotten.
    But now he’d go at it again using his son’s approach and applying the use of 9 for the 0 in “UBT108”: “UBT198.” 
    Hey! This would do:

Up
Before dawn and off to work you drive
To do your job and earn your pay

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