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Aging, I’ve grown more familiar with medical office décor and funerals. In general I prefer a traditional funeral where people meet afterward for a free sit-down in a church hall. 

I’ve been to those where a picnic is combined with a funeral, but for me that practice delivers the best of neither and the worst of both. I prefer picnicking without the dead.

Any case, my plate cleaned of hot dish and rice pudding, I rose, turned and there on the wall the ghostlike life-size of a former geometry teacher. 

As a student I’d not known her as a noteworthy Methodist. Truly, I don’t to this day know much of Methodism other than among the followers I have known it seems rather many have taken what I’d call an uncommonly staunch position on the rescue of female Chinese infants. 

Cynically I’ve wondered if babies weren’t ideal converts, gotten before they knew what hit them. And without consent, too, I’d venture, but that’s for another time.

The immediate (though deceased, isn’t that ironic) Methodist instructed in advanced math and geometry. Mathematically, I manage numbers on fingers and toes. Going beyond 20 requires undressing. But even that gets me only a modest one-digit gain. 

Any road, the portrait  of a former math person was upsetting to digestion despite, and I think this important, my lucky stars having kept me well clear of advanced anything in math. I was quite satisfied thinking algebra was something to be found in a Herberger lingerie department. 

My contact with the portraited one was in plain old Plane Geometry, a subject I took on advice because my selection of subjects needed at least one course to show I wasn’t a total lib arts loser.

Numerical limits aside, I got off wrong when the not-deceased-soon-enough-for-me instructor informed that geometry would teach us logic. 

Afflicted with the know-it-all (aka lazy) mind of a 15-year-old, this seemed the long way around to logic. My there-has-to-be-an-easier-way mentality was quick to balk at having to learn and take on faith, as given, a quagmire (more than 21 if you’re following) of theorems having to do with angles. Mostly. Lines, too. But mostly angles and things you could do with them and their measurements if you ever ran out of all other things you might care to do for entertainment or betterment of humanity. 

I personally saw no future in the Isosceles or Equilateral.

However, if you think I am aiming at saying ill words about said instructor, you’re wrong. She was utterly fascinating. Couldn’t take my eyes away in case I’d miss something. You see, for all her mathematical genius and superb learning, she was built funny, at least to sophomore me who saw in her another side of Plane Geometry. 

Unlike the curvy female form chastely alluded to in biology, this one had a straight up backside wall supported (improbably in my view) by two small feet shod in grandma-black shoes. The brick wall line ended with a circle (the head) leading to a slope easily (by my weak standards) described as Isoscelean (took a damn long time and much imaginative effort to put my geometric training to use, but I did it). 

The slope eventually went into freefall ending above the floor as it turned back toward the pair o’ shoes. Except for the circle, fascinatingly geometric and having nothing to do with logic. Perfect for me.

Ah, but the best part. For those of you not into geometry, the slope would in biology be called the bosom. Substantial, could be called, but also hypnotically captivating because that space sheltered a decent assortment of things a geometry teacher might want at hand in the classroom. 

Onto that slope a hand would fall, and from unseen recesses of cleavage would appear tissues or chalk or a hanky or pencil or hall pass. 

When she reached a similar age my mother would store her false teeth in such a place. Never seemed a particularly good idea to me, but what did I know? Certainly not much geometry.

In fact I was very nearly living proof against the utility of geometry. None of it stuck. I was the theorem of right angled wrongness and the get-nowhere of endless travel round an equilateral, or in my case, a wheel that fails. 

And yet, day on day, I sat and attentively watched, waiting. For what? 

A simple boy, I thought if chalk, rulers and other things could be brought from hiding why not other things? A rabbit was my wish. A dove or two were possible, or at least a long string of colorful knotted scarves. The slope of the unknown. 

The cleavage of the mysteries were there, like Delphi of Siwa except in the present, an oracular miracle in my Iron Range geometry classroom. 

Did any of you have anything better? Tout the best physics lab, superb drama department or top scoring team all you want. My geometry experience defied the plain.

Despite my tooth skin barely getting by geometric performance, my teacher took pride (not that she knew its cause) in my attention. I tried. Or at least it appeared I was trying. Which was good enough. 

In fact, the good woman often made use of me as an example. Not to emulate, of course. To avoid. “Don’t be like Harry,” she’d intone. “He doesn’t know how to think logically.” 

Quite right. She had it, or rather, she had me. Another instructor that year shook his head in as much amused puzzlement as the ancient Delphic geometry oracle to say with a smile “You, young man, are a collector of useless, isolated information.” 

Another score. Another eye of the bull.

Whatever our skills. Whether we’re seen on the wall of a Methodist hall or go largely unremembered we contribute. The parts we play need not be massive. I’d think it no way insulting to be remembered as looking for a rabbit where everyone knew none would appear. Keep looking. 

The rabbit is elusive: the difference between job and vocation, grasping distinctions between multiethnic and multi-cultural. Look for it. Keep watching.