This past week, Mrs Ho Ho and I attended my 50th college reunion. Yes, that's right: College (high school 50th was 4 years ago.)
A bit of background: I graduated in 1959, with majors in Physics and Math., and have kept in contact, off and on, mostly with individuals from and in that department. In recent years, we have contributed to scholarship funds, named for certain beloved professors from that time. More recently, we were invited to start our own named fund, with matching university contributions. We named it The Philemon & Baucis Scholarship Fund, after our favorite myth. (If you page down the link, you wll see a picture of a very special tree. That symbol is a metaphor which runs through our lives.)
A few years ago, I sent out invitations for my 70th birthday. I discovered Butterbelly's signature line just in time to include it on the invitation. It is this:
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
- Anais Nin"
I borrowed it with her permission and later included it on a personal card. The front of the card has our names, the name of the fund, and a picture of the intertwined trees. The back has the Nin quotation.
We now return you to the point of this message.
I gave my personal card to one of the reunion organizers. She was so taken with the Nin quote that she decided to read that as a preface to her banquet talk, rather than quoting a poem from our 50 y.o. yearbook.
A bit later, those in attendance were asked to sketch out a short profile of their lives since college days. When my turn came, I stated something like the following (this was not written out, so I am reconstruction it from a rather faulty memory.)
"Patty was kind enough to present the Anais Nin quotation which is part of my personal card. I ask you now to consider it from a somewhat different perspective:
"Each [teacher, professor, mentor] represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
Oh, how true that is! It is true for a contact with a friend, and it is true a hundred times over for those professors who managed to instill their knowledge and, better yet, their wisdom, in us.
I tell you the story of one such contact.
In the first week of my first quarter as a physics major, I was told to go to one of the physics labs and introduce myself to the instructor in charge of the labs. I had not met the man, nor seen his picture.
I went to the lab, as ordered, and encountered a giant of a man, tall and muscular, somewhat Oriental in appearance. He had placed what looked like a sewer cover across a couple of concrete blocks and was pounding away on it with a truck axle, shaping it into a curve.
Pound! Pound! Pound! This formidable individual worked that axle like a pile driver. His face was grim with the effort.
My god, this can't be my instructor! Who is this man?
When he saw me, he stopped what he was doing, and grinned. Turned out that this was indeed my instructor, Don O., a Swede. The Oriental appearance was due to life-long diabetes. He was actually shaping some heavy lead plates to use a shielding in an experiment involving radioactivity. He was no stranger to intense effort - it was one of the ways that he kept his diabetes under control.
He turned out to be a highly philosophical individual, and the kindest of men.
Later in the year, I was having a terrible time grasping the concepts of (voltage and current) lag and lead, power factors, and the effect of capacitive and inductive loads. I sat in his office for nearly three hours one Saturday, until I finally grasped what he was trying to tell me.
"...and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
That information eventually became the basis of a whole area of mathematics involving Fourier Analysis, the Fourier Transform, and the FFT. An understanding of this, in turn, led to my major career path of signal analysis and pattern recognition in sonar, radar, and cardiac medicine. This was helped along by a class in statistics that I took post-grad.
Don and I remained friends for years after I entered industry. We, his family, friends and colleagues, lost him to a very premature death at age 63, from the diabetes he fought so long.
While working for a pacemaker company, doing cardiac signal analysis, we hired a young woman for the group, largely because of her programming ability and her background in statistics (U of Chicago.) Years later, we fell in love, married, and she sits here beside me at this moment.
"... by this meeting ... a new world is born." Yes, professors can open the door to new worlds. Going through that door, I met the one I love [Mrs Ho Ho]
I'm sure that you have all had similar experiences. Let's hear it for our profs."
A bit of background: I graduated in 1959, with majors in Physics and Math., and have kept in contact, off and on, mostly with individuals from and in that department. In recent years, we have contributed to scholarship funds, named for certain beloved professors from that time. More recently, we were invited to start our own named fund, with matching university contributions. We named it The Philemon & Baucis Scholarship Fund, after our favorite myth. (If you page down the link, you wll see a picture of a very special tree. That symbol is a metaphor which runs through our lives.)
A few years ago, I sent out invitations for my 70th birthday. I discovered Butterbelly's signature line just in time to include it on the invitation. It is this:
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
- Anais Nin"
I borrowed it with her permission and later included it on a personal card. The front of the card has our names, the name of the fund, and a picture of the intertwined trees. The back has the Nin quotation.
We now return you to the point of this message.
I gave my personal card to one of the reunion organizers. She was so taken with the Nin quote that she decided to read that as a preface to her banquet talk, rather than quoting a poem from our 50 y.o. yearbook.
A bit later, those in attendance were asked to sketch out a short profile of their lives since college days. When my turn came, I stated something like the following (this was not written out, so I am reconstruction it from a rather faulty memory.)
"Patty was kind enough to present the Anais Nin quotation which is part of my personal card. I ask you now to consider it from a somewhat different perspective:
"Each [teacher, professor, mentor] represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
Oh, how true that is! It is true for a contact with a friend, and it is true a hundred times over for those professors who managed to instill their knowledge and, better yet, their wisdom, in us.
I tell you the story of one such contact.
In the first week of my first quarter as a physics major, I was told to go to one of the physics labs and introduce myself to the instructor in charge of the labs. I had not met the man, nor seen his picture.
I went to the lab, as ordered, and encountered a giant of a man, tall and muscular, somewhat Oriental in appearance. He had placed what looked like a sewer cover across a couple of concrete blocks and was pounding away on it with a truck axle, shaping it into a curve.
Pound! Pound! Pound! This formidable individual worked that axle like a pile driver. His face was grim with the effort.
My god, this can't be my instructor! Who is this man?
When he saw me, he stopped what he was doing, and grinned. Turned out that this was indeed my instructor, Don O., a Swede. The Oriental appearance was due to life-long diabetes. He was actually shaping some heavy lead plates to use a shielding in an experiment involving radioactivity. He was no stranger to intense effort - it was one of the ways that he kept his diabetes under control.
He turned out to be a highly philosophical individual, and the kindest of men.
Later in the year, I was having a terrible time grasping the concepts of (voltage and current) lag and lead, power factors, and the effect of capacitive and inductive loads. I sat in his office for nearly three hours one Saturday, until I finally grasped what he was trying to tell me.
"...and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
That information eventually became the basis of a whole area of mathematics involving Fourier Analysis, the Fourier Transform, and the FFT. An understanding of this, in turn, led to my major career path of signal analysis and pattern recognition in sonar, radar, and cardiac medicine. This was helped along by a class in statistics that I took post-grad.
Don and I remained friends for years after I entered industry. We, his family, friends and colleagues, lost him to a very premature death at age 63, from the diabetes he fought so long.
While working for a pacemaker company, doing cardiac signal analysis, we hired a young woman for the group, largely because of her programming ability and her background in statistics (U of Chicago.) Years later, we fell in love, married, and she sits here beside me at this moment.
"... by this meeting ... a new world is born." Yes, professors can open the door to new worlds. Going through that door, I met the one I love [Mrs Ho Ho]
I'm sure that you have all had similar experiences. Let's hear it for our profs."
