When I was entering fifth grade, we moved from the farm and a three-room schoolhouse to the big city and an elementary school with two floors and three classrooms for each grade.

That's where the King and I met. Miss Kolthoff's class. He'd moved just a few blocks that same fall, but it meant changing to a new neighborhood school.

Just like in the country, city kids ate paste by the fingerful from gallon jars and deeply inhaled the smell of freshly mimeographed paper; but among the new wonders and curiosities, we had inkwell holes in our desks. In Miss Kolthoff's wisdom borne of experience, bottles of India ink for those inkwells were only handed out on the day final copies were to be written. Rorschach blobs on our papers from 50-year-old bent pen nubs and ink-stained fingers made me glad those antiques were dispensed with in favor of ball point pens the following year.

Every year the city newspaper hosted a spelling bee. A multi-page newsprint list of words was passed out for us to study, and I pored over it at length. The first round was in class. We stayed standing as long as we spelled correctly. There was a written test later among the top spellers. V-A-G-U-E. Every time I've used it in the ensuing 50-some years, I remember the day and the word that did me in.

And someone else (who dotted her i's with hearts until Miss Kolthoff sharply told her that Valentine's Day was over and she should STOP) went on to the next round.

I, even I, am He Who blots out and cancels your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins. Isaiah 43:25