Today is someone’s birthday. That’s always true; but today is the birthday, not only of my sister-in-law, not only of one of the friendliest residents of the retirement community where I work, but also of the woman who was my high school and college sweetheart. And since the page above, done near the end of the year, refers to her, and I’m thinking of her, now seems a good time to post this page.

Here are the words to the treble acrostic:

Caught in the rectangle seven now wait
One sop on Time couldn’t wait for the eighth
Syllogized vector sums wither inchoate
Inching tangentially wouldn’t you know it
Nillie alongside her Porche wears a bra
Even if doffable next Mardi Gras

It has been more than thirty-five years since I was an engineering student, and the meager knowledge I gathered then, about trigonometric functions and analytic geometry and integral equations and other such arcana, mostly withered. But the language of the mathematics stayed with me as a sort of circumstantial evidence that I am better off manipulating word arrays than differentials. Still, since I never punched through the walls between me-then and a master’s degree in systems and industrial engineering, there’s a dim yearning to get back to it and finish what I started. Alas, life is probably too short for me to do so.