Looking back, I see my life after B-CC as a story of good luck and being at the right place at the right time. (My thanks to Miss Casey for her reflections on life, beyond the subject of English - for instance, “If you’ve never been hungry or desperate, you don’t need to congratulate yourself on never having stolen anything.”)

After a B. S. in Zoology from University of Maryland (thanks to Mrs. Roberge, Mr. Nelson, and Mr. Iacangelo for great science preparation), I went on to get an M. S. from University of Washington in Seattle. More important, as it turns out, I met and married Paul Dayton, a fellow Zoology graduate student with an amazing twinkle in his eye. When he finished his PhD, he joined the faculty at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, and we’ve been based in Southern California ever since. We marvel at how wonderful our son and daughter have been all their lives, and we’re now enjoying our daughter-in-law, son-in-law, and four granddaughters as well.

When our children were small, I stopped working in research labs and took up freelance editing - I could do it at home with a bunch of kids roaring around the house. (Thank you for the rigorous grammar lessons and sentence diagramming, Miss Bingaman.) When personal computers came onto the scene, I traded copyediting for computer classes and then went on to write magazine articles, newsletters, and books, including The Photoshop Wow! Book, for artists who use the computer in their work. I worked with wonderful co-authors and many talented designers, photographers, and illustrators over the years. But 20 years turned out to be enough Photoshop Wow, and I’m now retired from that and trying my hand at writing fiction.

I think the accomplishment I’m proudest of is working with two other parents to start a multi-grade alternative within our public elementary school - a child-directed cooperative learning environment with parent participation and peer tutoring, or in other words, a “hippie school.” It’s still going strong 35 years later. (My thanks to B-CC vice principal Ray Zimmerman. Stubborn as an ox about enforcing school rules, he probably wouldn’t have approved of this alternative class. But he was enthusiastic about life and dedicated to serving B-CC, his neighborhood, and his church, and as a friend and neighbor he taught me by example that work is over when the job is done, not when 5 o’clock rolls around.)

Looking forward to seeing as many of us as can make it in November!