Yesterday we stopped at Magee's Bakery for cheese danish and sat across from my old high school, now defanged, serving as a county education building. I found the windows of my algebra 2 classroom, remembered Baldy Gelb, football coach and math teacher, could almost see the chalk dust motes floating in the air.
It was a long time ago, of course, but looking at that brick building (how can it sit there so placidly? what happened to all the adolescent angst?), I felt that I could have reached out and opened the door to that classroom, found my seat and struggled with a quadratic equation.