Busy Being Born

The Constant of Change

I took two English elective classes during my senior year at Far Rockaway High School, in New York. In the first, a creative writing class taught by Mrs. Storch, a petite woman of particular refinement, a local, Bayswater resident and teacher of generations of precocious humanists at that school, I wrote what my first, high school love reviewed enthusiastically as a “Maileresque” account of my just concluded hippie hitchhiking adventure up the coast of California. The second class, in the study of poetry, led by Carl Field, included in it the crème de la crème of the school’s senior class English students. Such was Mr. Field’s confidence in his students that he employed our verdant young minds in a demonstration class before two visitors from the board of education. Whether this demonstration related to new curricular development or some advancement in Field’s career, I was too out of the loop to know. As was the tendency of the goateed and glibly confident, early middle-aged man, des…