Dear Miss Webster, Latin teacher at Schenectady High School, 1929-1931,

I dedicate this piece to you. I thank you for introducing me to Cicero. I wish we had given more time to the content of this essay and less to the past perfect subjunctive, or whatever we used it to work on. But I suppose that even you, who seemed as old as Cato the Elder at the time, were not old enough to discourse on old age. Someone said that youth is wasted on the young. It is also true, alas, that the wisdom of age is wasted if confined to the old.