When I was 15 I took high school chemistry. That’s what college-bound kids did in the 60s; enrolled in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics in that order, the final three years of school.

It wasn’t a favorite course but I did well enough. I liked biology and physics more than chemistry, but it turned out to be useful, just like algebra has been handier than geometry even though it was not the subject I preferred.

Remember, we were boomers. So experiments and new programs were forever run on us. That year and for a few following, it was “Chem Study.” A different approach, I heard, from what had gone before. But I wouldn’t know about that. I didn’t do the before or after, and I did Chem Study twice.

Although I rarely felt as secure about my chemistry as about my other work, apparently it was good enough. I got a decent grade and the teacher asked me to serve as his lab assistant the following (my senior) year. They gave me academic credit the first semester and $0.98 an hour the second. And the teacher hooked me up with a rich college girl from Kent Woodlands. I don’t remember her name but I recall that she went to Dominican and took Chem Study there, that she had an anorexic twin sister about whom I heard but never met, that she drove a powder blue Mustang convertible in which she picked me up at school and delivered me home, and that I sat at a table while she did her homework next to me, looking either at her paper or the swimming pool in the yard, munching Doritos and drinking Fresca. She paid me $3 an hour and I now believe it was the cushiest job I ever had.

The teacher’s name was Mr. Girton. He was quiet and bookish, narrow-built and bespectacled with thick dark barbered hair, and he had unusually long clean fingernails. He looked like Dennis’s father in the comic strip. There were rumors of weirdness about him among the students, but they never amounted to scandal or arose from malice.

I got to know him, of course. He was a good soul, a gentle man and a gentleman, thoughtful and interested. The fingernails were owing to his hobby; he was a serious classical guitarist.

I penned a ditty about him when I was his student. I just dug the piece of lined notebook paper out of the footlocker (Feb 7, 2011). It’s rough and I blush for its meter, but it’s got spirit. And it helped me never forget John Girton or Avogadro’s number (6.02 times 10²³).

(sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”)

JE Girton came to class
Riding on a slide rule
He stuck an atom in a cell
And called the test tube neutral

Chorus:

John E Girton keep it up
Keep our young minds churning.
Help us know Le Chatelier
And we can’t help not learning!

You rehearse your daily speech
Inspired by your goal
To help us find atomic weight
And meet your friend, the mole

(chorus)

We really are awake in class
Although you have to prod so
We hang on every word you say
And worship Avogadro

(chorus)

I think we’d flunk without the aid
Of faithful “Help Yourself” box.
We love to sit here taking notes
We live to see your lab smocks

(chorus)