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Why (as in yaverbaum)
about you, it’s about me,” etc.) But Lesley started to cry. I couldn’t take it. So I un-broke up.
• Almost as important as Sing at Midwood were the three choruses: the Boys Chorus, the Girls Chorus, and the Mixed Chorus. As I mentioned above, repeatedly, I can’t sing a note. I did and do love music, however, and I knew all of the major songs that were sung by the members of the choruses, with the powerful and exuberant spir- itual “Ride the Chariot” being my favorite. When Christmastime would come around, notwithstanding that Midwood was a primarily Jewish school (at least if you were counting just the “academic” stu- dents), the members of the three choruses would assemble and, with anyone else who wished to join in, go caroling throughout the neigh- borhood. I always joined in, I always sang, and I always loved it.
• Like most sophomores in Six Majors, I loved studying geometry, especially with Mr. Weiss, who would sing, “Off to the back of the book we go,” every time that he would introduce a new theorem. I was gripped by the logic, rigor, structure, and beauty of it (concepts that actually remained important to me during my legal career). One big moment that sticks with me is when Mr. Weiss explained that we were studying Euclidean plane geometry, which had as one of its axioms the so-called “parallel postulate,” which, in lay terms, says that in plane geometry what we know as parallel lines can never meet. He then taught us that that is but one way of looking at the world and that there were other geometries in which parallel lines do meet. Further, he said that one of those geometries was central to Einstein’s theory of relativity. I was intrigued and decided to find out more about other geometries generally, and Einstein in particu- lar. Within days I found Einstein and Infeld’s The Evolution of Physics, an extremely accessible and nonquantitative book, which became the first of many books on physics and math that became a meaning- ful part of my reading life. (Mickey Mantle had been my childhood hero, but at some point, Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winner for
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