I got the best education a person could have, in my Western Pennsylvania home town, in the late 60’s.\u00a0 To have had a better education, I would have had to have lived elsewhere.\u00a0 Since I had no choice where I lived or the time when I lived there, without doubt it was the best education I could possibly have had.<\/p>\n
Did I ever tell you I got thrown off the high school newspaper staff because I wrote and circulated an “underground” magazine and got caught doing so?\u00a0 Yes?\u00a0 OK, we’ll move on.<\/p>\n
Speaking of the best education a person can have (or could have had, employing the past-perfect subjunctive<\/a>), my best friend Bill was sent home from high school one day, I think it was a June day.\u00a0 Actually, maybe it was summer school, but does it really matter?\u00a0 He was sent home because he dared wear a V-neck top to school.\u00a0 Bill was a fashion plate, not a rebel.\u00a0 Bill fantasized about owning a clothing store or, better yet, doing clothing design.\u00a0 In one of our hour-long high-school phone chats, he made up the name for his store: “Wilson Blair”.\u00a0 Sounded impressive to me.\u00a0 Not impressive enough, apparently, for some sex-mindful teacher who found acute-angled necklines too suggestive, even where no cleavage was involved.\u00a0 (Who WAS this teacher?\u00a0 Was it Mrs. Pitzer?\u00a0 I wish Bill were around to remind me, and reminisce and joke about it over a suitable beverage.)<\/p>\n So, after having experienced the best high-school education I possibly could have had (even taking into account our back-to-back teacher-strike shortened spring semesters, where many weeks of the best education I could have possibly had were irretrievably lost), I applied to colleges like Harvard, Yale, MIT and C-MU.<\/p>\n Here is my visual memory of the Harvard interview, from background to foreground: picture-window overlooking the city, crisply-dressed man, large wooden and leather desk, a few feet of carpet, and me, in a chair, probably the smallest chair I ever sat in, maybe because I was the smallest I had ever been.<\/p>\n I never attended Harvard.\u00a0 This was OK because I didn’t belong, they knew it, and I knew it.\u00a0 I remember the interviewer asking me a question about civil rights.\u00a0 This was 1969.\u00a0 Now, while I could tell you who was on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on Sunday, my awareness of the civil rights struggle was woefully limited to scenes of fire hoses turned on marchers and rioters on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.\u00a0 (In our house, the only shows we watched were on CBS since Channel 2 had the strongest signal from 50 miles away).\u00a0 Western Pennsylvania in the 1960’s was probably one of the more racist regions in the country outside the Deep South (I say this retrospectively because I didn’t grasp it then).\u00a0 But of course, no one used the “R”-word at that time, in that place.\u00a0 Instead, what was going on was called “prejudice” and no one admitted to having it (or perhaps only a little bit of it, sort of like having a “mild cold”).\u00a0 I had it too, but it took me a while to know it and get over it.<\/p>\n So, after receiving the best possible education one could have in the 1960’s in a small town in Western Pennsylvania, I wound up going to C-MU in Pittsburgh, the same city where my wife-to-be was already attending college.\u00a0 (Odd how things turned out that way, yes?)\u00a0 My parents paid for the intellectual and social education of their too-sheltered son, without much oversight or intervention.<\/p>\n I find myself wishing I had taken more advantage of the learning opportunity that the university and my parents provided.\u00a0 But realistically, I didn’t have the maturity to absorb it.\u00a0 So now, when I can’t sleep at night, I log on to arxiv.org<\/a> and read physics papers, hoping to get a better understanding of the universe and the forces that shape it.\u00a0 I’m not sure this is what my parents and teachers had in mind forty years ago, but this isn’t Western Pennsylvania any more, Dorothy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I got the best education a person could have, in my Western Pennsylvania home town, in the late 60’s.\u00a0 To have had a better education, I would have had to have lived elsewhere.\u00a0 Since I had no choice where I … Continue reading