Our first evidence of this faith, of her unusual predilection, was also my opportunity to shine. Miss Tynes announced, early in the school year (our pencil boxes still new, tablets blank, the prospect of order tantalizing, still possible) that our class belonged to a club, the Object of the Month Club, which was sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, a huge building which held some of the great treasures of the world. Each month we would receive a copy of a different work of art, and each time it would be something surprising, probably something we’d never seen before. On an easel beside her rested a framed canvas, its blank backside turned to us, and when she lifted it and turned it around, there was a familiar, soft-focus image, a pink-cheeked blond girl in a black outfit standing on a garden path, both arms holding up a gardener’s watering can.

Miss Tynes said, “Does anyone know the name of this painting, or the name of the artist who painted it?”

I raise my hand, am called upon, and announce, “That is Girl with a Watering Can, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.”

The “Pierre-Auguste” part is, of course, the flourish on my bit of knowledge that begins a relationship between Miss Tynes and me that is collaborative, thrilling, collegial; I am a special boy, I am athirst for the sort of knowledge that flows from her so easily, an acolyte in her church. She recognizes me in some way that is new for me.

Miss Tynes is a weaver; her looms, her enchantment with fiber, are the center of her life, and she has even shown her work, she tells my mother, at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, a collection of names that sound to me as burnished and evocative of other worlds as, say, Dar-es-Salaam. Under Miss Tynes’s tutelage—lucky for me she has to teach to earn a living; what’s a weaver to do, in 1962?—my love of exotic places flowers. I am a connoisseur of places I can’t go. I read Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar and daydream about that lost city, unreachable on its vined escarpment—Opar, whose name echoes the opal my mother’s bought in Mexico, a “fire opal” with gleams of brilliant orange leaping out of deep facets inside the smooth body of the stone. Sometimes I am enthralled by books of a deep sadness: the cruel struggles of Black Beauty, the unwavering devotion of Old Yeller, and a novel about a cougar who lives high on a cliff in the desert mountains, singular, golden-eyed, heartbreakingly alone. I read a book by Richard Halliburton about Tibet, the Kingdom at the Roof of the World, and love to imagine the towers, the scented pavilions occupied, sometimes, by clouds. Nepal, Golden Gate Park: glimmering openings toward other, hidden chambers of the world.