Dwaine and I have launched a search for our high school German teacher, Mr. Finn Englyng. We both started taking his class in 8th grade, being bussed over from our junior high to the local high school for 6th period, and continued through to our senior year in high school. He was such an influencial teacher to both of us, that we tried to look him up in our high school’s website so that we could stop in and visit him at school one of these days. He wasn’t listed as a teacher anymore. I told Dwaine it’s okay, as I had Mr. Englyng’s email address and would write to him that way. But my email to him got kicked back the next day. I spent much of the next morning on the internet searching for Mr. Englyng, and was able to find another email address for him from a helpful message he’d posted on a teacher’s online forum in 1996. I forwarded the original email to this new address, and minutes later, that got kicked back as well. Shit. The latest thing I could find on him was something to do with an educational pilot program he, along with 6 other teachers, had tried to launch which finally succeeded according to the 2006 write-up. I could find nothing after that. I even called our school district administrative offices and spoke to someone in human resources; she put me on hold but 5 minutes later my call somehow transferred to the main menu again. Exasperated, I hung up.

Where are you, Mr. Englyng? I’m going to keep searching until I get an answer. Dwaine brought up a health concern that I didn’t know about — Mr. Englyng is diabetic. We hope he retired and is in good health enjoying his free time at home. You can tell he made an imprint on me because my “quotes” page has things he’d said that had stayed with me all these many years.