When I was about four years old, and that was 60 years ago, I lived in an old brick farm house with two parlors that had floor to ceiling windows hung with lace curtains. Back then, these were very high maintenance and were only washed once a year. When they were taken down to be washed, a year's worth of old house dust must have been released and I remember that smell that reminds me of a room or a house closed up for years.

Once washed in a wringer washer, drying the lace curtains was an equally onerous task because each one had to be attached to pins spaced about an inch apart on long wood stretcher squares, a technique similar to blocking a hand knit sweater today. There were at least six pairs of curtains and my mother and aunt who helped out with this chore would have to place two curtains on one stretcher square.

Once pinned, the curtains were placed in the sun and that is where a second, more wonderful fragrance comes in that I can recall strongly to this day. There must have been a chemical reaction between the detergent and starch used and the sun that gave off this incredibly strong scent of what I can only interpret as "clean." I loved it then and to this day when I think of those lace curtains, that unique and pleasing odor easily comes to mind.

Out of all my high school teachers, Mr. R., the young man who taught 9th grade history was the most memorable even though I was blessed with many, many great teachers. When I was in school, 9th grade history was generally a course in world geography with an overview of the relationship between ethnic groups and the political boundaries that defined the countries they lived in. There was much emphasis on maps. This course was a precursor to more intense study of American and World History courses to come.

Long before I entered 9th grade in 1962, I was always enamored with maps and globes having a well-worn world atlas and a box filled with “National Geographic” maps from the earliest days of publication. I would spend hours twirling my globe with closed eyes, point a finger on a spot when it stopped, and if it wasn’t in the middle of an ocean, I would look up the country I landed on in the set of Collier’s Encyclopedia my mother had bought on time from a door-to-door salesman.

Mr. R., my 9th grade history teacher, brought all of my curiosity to life as we learned countries and capitols, cities and regions. My favorite assignment in class was the actual construction of maps. A girlfriend and I picked Africa and we set to work drawing the map on two gigantic pieces of poster board my mother bought. One Sunday afternoon, our heads were bent over the dining room table working furiously with crayons and colored pencils (years before markers) when there was a knock on our front door. It was Mr. R., who lived down the street, stopping by to give us some “atta-girls” for our hard work. His short inspirational visit that a teacher would do this just about blew our minds! He was a really nice man who genuinely cared for his students.

Mr. R. and his wife rented an apartment in a farm house that belonged to an acquaintance of my dad. Also a renter in that house was a girl in my class whose mother was reputed to be a prostitute. My dad told me that “something happened” there that caused Mr. R. and his wife to go their separate ways and the woman and her daughter to be evicted. Apparently, the landlord, who I remember as a scary, deeply religious zealot, contacted the school complaining about a person of such questionable character who was teaching children and I suspect Mr. R. was not invited back. I never learned all the details of the story but I remember feeling broken-hearted that this wonderful man was gone. The worst part of this news was that I had placed my much admired teacher on a pedestal because he really turned me on to studying and learning something I loved. That he was human too and had the capacity to make mistakes was to me the cause of much distress.

Many years later, I remember Mr. R. with much fondness for the gift of enthusiasm for learning he imparted on his students. I hope he went on to teach many other young minds.