May is the month in which I graduated from grammar school and, four years later, high school. It was also the month in which I received my graduate degree. My college commencement was in early June. Ever since, as the lilacs bloom in the first warm days of mid-spring, I am taken back to those school days.

 

I loved school from its beginning -- for me, in January 1944 to its end on June 5, 1964 -- from age 5 to 25 as a ward of academe. Truly, I did not want it to end. Once I was on the point of going back for more, but it didn't work out so I struck out on my own as an aspirant scholar and have been at it ever since, producing along the way eight books that some people have actually read.

 

Introduced at a relatively early age to the task of critical thinking and to what I can only describe as focused absorption, I have come to understand over a considerable term of years that one is best equipped with both, rather than one or the other.

 

A series of teachers imbued in me the necessity (and pleasure) of thinking through the simplest statement to catch on to what may have been its meaning in the wider way of things. For example, the superintendent of an upper New York State school district recently told parents of Jewish children objecting to their being taunted by other children, "Your expectation for changing inborn prejudice may be a bit unrealistic."

 

My first reaction may have been typical: I thought the superintendent to be a dolt, careless of the injustice that he might be expected to counter. Then, after working the statement over, I came to see that he could have been saying, in effect, "That's how it is. They must hear it at home. What can I do about that?"

 

How I processed his comment is, I think, is an elementary example of critical thinking. Of course, it can be and surely is applied to greater challenges than parsing a sentence, but the process is the same.

 

As to absorption: It helps -- or at least it helped me -- to be compulsive by nature. When at about 10 years old I discovered in our village library a row of Victor Appleton's Tom Swift books -- at least 15 of the 40 Appleton wrote -- I plowed into them one after the other. Soon I began to speak after the manner of one of the characters, the eccentric Mr. Wakeneld Damon, who went about exclaiming, "Well, bless my (fill in the blank) -- everything from "my collar button" to "my hat" to "my dear maiden aunt."

 

Just prior to getting into the Appleton-Swift world, I had read and re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and so was inured to the appealing African-American character's diction and enunciation that were different than what I understood to be correct. I was too na�ve to see how such a difference could be used against the likes of Clemens' Jim or Appleton's "Eradicate," or "Rad," for short. Withal, on I went through the Appleton books.

 

My parents may have thought me a tad strange, but I think they were glad to have me out of their hair. My playmates pretty much gave up on the fat kid who always had his nose in a book. Though not always.

 

It was at about the same time that I began to hang around the town's railroad depot, where I was befriended by the kind station agent. He undertook to teach me everything there was to know about railroading, which was plenty. Under his tutelage, I learned Morse Code, railroad lingo and how to do this and that to make the trains run on time.

 

One day he gave me an extra copy of the line's timetable, whereupon I set myself to memorize every station stop on the 225-mile division of the then-Pere Marquette Railway between Grand Rapids, its southern Michigan terminus, through our town to the end of the line in Petoskey. Not only the stations, but also their distances north from the terminus along with the telegraph call of each.

 

From memory: Sparta 15 PA, Kent City 20 KC, Casnovia 22 CN, Grant 30 AN, Newaygo 36 NY, White Cloud 47 MR, Bitely 63 B, Baldwin 74 BI, Kaleva 110 CR, Thompsonville 121 MO, Interlochen 134 KN, Traverse City 148 UN, Williamsburg 158 WM, Rapid City 168 VB, Alden 172 SC, Bellaire 183 RE, Central Lake 192 RK, Ellsworth SW 198, Charlevoix 210 MX, Petoskey 225 HI.

 

If at this moment you are sorely tempted to find something else more interesting to read (and what wouldn't be?), you understand how one person's absorption can be the source of another person's annoyance.

 

Yet what that boyhood project of mine fitted me for was the kind of work I had to do in college and graduate school. Learning Latin in high school and German in college was one thing. Learning Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek later on was quite another, believe me. It required focused absorption, which is the only way I could have succeeded -- and did succeed.

 

My intelligent quotient likely is not as high as that of any of my four children, and definitely not as high as that of the mothers of either the older or the younger two. What made the difference for me was having internalized early on the process of critical thinking and having the freedom to indulge my desire to want to know everything about anything.

 

So to those who, on the one hand, were and perhaps still are nettled by my constant probings with their "whys" and "wherefores," or those who have been driven to distraction by my tendency to get lost in the damnedest thing, I herewith apologize.

 

But did I mention the reciting of Shakespeare's works, another of my compulsions?

 

... this rough magic

I here abjure, and when I have required

Some heavenly music, which even now I do,

To work mine end upon their senses that

This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.

 

That's Prospero in The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1, lines 50-57.