Several years ago I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I was working on my doctorate in physics, about possible ways to test superstring theory, when my brother in Tulsa died suddenly from a heart attack. Both parents had earlier passed away. After the funeral I drove past my past, marveling at the enormous changes that had taken place since I grew up there. I drove by the red brick building, now an enormous warehouse, that had once been Tulsa Central High. My grades in history, Latin, and English lit were low, but I was good in math and had a great physics teacher. He was mainly responsible for my majoring in physics after a scholarship took me to the University of Chicago.

While I was having dinner at a popular restaurant on the corner of Main and Sixth streets, the waitress stared at me with a look of surprise. “Are you Michael Brown?”

“That's me,” I said. She smiled and held out a hand. “I'm Thelma O'Keefe. We were in the same algebra 101 class.”

We shook hands.

“You won't remember me,” she said. “I was fat in those days, and shy, and not very pretty.”

“That's hard to believe,”; I said. “You look gorgeous now.”

“Well, thank you, kind sir,” she said, smiling. “You were a whiz at algebra. Do you remember when you caught Mr. Miller in a mistake he made on the blackboard, and how embarrassed he was?”