At the end of my junior year of high school, my father got military orders that moved us back to Germany.  Although I was very disappointed at having to change schools for my senior year, it proved to be a real blessing.  Why?  Well, because I was put into the Advanced Placement English Class taught by Miss Nichols!

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She was truly a task master, but more importantly, she was a fabulous teacher!  We read and studied what now would be considered standard curriculum for an introduction to western civilization course - Greek plays, St. Augustine's City of God, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, two (maybe three) Shakespearean plays are just samples.  To this day, I can bore my friends by reciting the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in middle English - not a particularly laudable parlor trick!

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More than that though, she required us to write - a lot!   At first, she tended to accept that I managed to get some words on paper without violating major rules of grammar.  Adherence to the standard rules, including oxford commas, and paragraph organization turned out to be steppingstones to exposition which of necessity demonstrated logical consistency and clarity.   For me, this was a gargantuan step that proved valuable in my further academic and career pursuits.

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After retirement I decided to write a textbook on Linear Algebra - I am after all, a mathematician despite my initial liberal arts pursuits in German and philosophy.  That book is still in review and i hope to publish it in time for my elementary school grandchildren to read it by the time they hit the tenth grade!  While writing it, I paused to consider how I would present eigenvectors and eigenvalues -- that's probably the last I'll mention those on this site!  During the pause which dragged on for four months I occupied my time by writing something non-technical, a novel which was published this past January, "A Chesapeake Nightmare."  If you search this site with some diligence, you might even find a link to it!

And then, out of the blue - as the expression goes - I stumbled upon some things I wrote for Miss Nichols.  How they didn't get lost or discarded in the last sixty years is a puzzle.  Their resurface brought back many memories of that year in Frankfurt and Hanau most of which would be of no interest to almost anyone. 

However well I now can convey ideas in prose or verse is undeniably due to a marvelous woman who demanded the best of me.  I so wish she were still with us to paint my efforts with red ink once again.  Thank you Miss Nichols; may you rest in peace.