This is the text of the letter received from Stephen Langfur...

Stephen Langfur, forty years later..........

I have forgotten my Latin, Miss Leavitt. All those hours of homework!. Oh, yes, it has helped with my English, but still - !

Sometimes we meet in a dream, and you ask me to decline a noun. It is embarrassing.

I don't want you to think that your work has gone for nothing. I was one of your star pupils. We went through Virgil together! I shall never forget how you walked across the front of the classroom, stomping out anapests, or whatever pests they were.

Amo, amas, amat...

I've forgotten my Latin, but I haven't forgotten you. You - your "style," way of being, a way of looking at a person, a way of dealing with stuff, became part of me. And this would not have been possible were it not for the Latin. More than you taught me Latin, Latin taught me you. That has been important. For that I am thankful.

Likewise, I have forgotten my French, physics, chemistry, math, Silas Marner (inevitable as pimples, that gruesome experience kept me arms length from the wonderful George Eliot for forty long years) - history too, Mr. Kogel. All those journals I kept for you (truly for you, love being the fuel of learning) - lost! I had to relearn my history later. But you I never forgot. Sophomore history taught me you - your different approach, your thought-questions, your trust in me. You became part of me. I am thankful.

These lessons I too pass on: Miss Leavitt, Mr. Kogel, the others some of whose names I've forgotten. When I pass them on, people probably think they are getting me, and they are, but in getting me they are getting these others, as I, in getting them, was probably getting their others. The real, the enduring, is precisely the evanescent, the caring glance of Miss Leavitt, the sardonic twinkle of Mr. Kogel. Of such stuff a life is made. Amo, amas, amat...

These teachers had, of course, material, and the material taught us the teachers. We students had nothing yet but our crazy, mixed-up, insecure (me, anyhow) not-quite-selves. I remember a terrible aching loneliness, which most of us felt, I imagine, but who would let on? Those were the pre-Portnoy years when the dam of self-constraint was about to burst but had not yet quite, in our region.

Mike Mosher has stayed with me. We weren't friends, and we never made contact again after Lawrence, but he has always been with me, for which I am thankful.

As for me: I went to Goddard College, a tiny progressive school in Vermont, and it was the closest I've ever been to community, and great. Then I went on to study philosophy (as Mosher predicted in our yearbook). My studies led me into Judaism and over to Israel. Got married, have two kids. I became a guide, which is still my way of earning bread. Disenchanted with Israel, I refused an army order to serve in the West Bank and did a short stint in the brig. I have immortalized this experience in a book called Confession from a Jericho Jail, which is currently out of print. (But see Amazon!) I spend a lot of time trying to make literature - it's what I love to do - though I'm not sure anything will come of it. I do the language editing for a left-wing magazine called Challenge, in charge of which is Roni Ben Efrat, the woman to whom I am happily bound. Amo, amas, amat... What next?

REUNION HOME PAGE