I live nowhere near the scenes of my childhood, haven’t grown into middle age in the land of my youth and young adulthood, so returning there can make me dizzy.

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.