Not too long ago, I was sitting in the well-appointed office of my friend, a senior officer of a brokerage firm, with whom I had a luncheon appointment. Before leaving the office for our chosen restaurant, I casually told her the story of Mr. Frank Balmer and his little black notebook. Why I did so has now escaped me.
Mr. Balmer was one of my high school teachers in Toronto, Canada, during the mid-1950s. I hadn’t thought about him for scores of years until I faced retirement. Then he became a frequent apparition in my mind, but not because he had been a master teacher, or was remembered for making profound pronouncements to generations of students.
A more likely candidate for such a mentor would be Mr. Hundert, the main character in Ethan Canin’s short story “The Palace Thief,” which Hollywood turned into the poignant motion picture “The Emperor’s Club.” Kevin Kline, you may recall, played the role of the erudite schoolmaster who tried to leave upon the minds of his countless charges “the delicate imprint of their culture.” More simply, Mr. Balmer was a science teacher, who honestly tried, with the help of his dry wit, to pound the principles of physics into the minds of my classmates and me.
The sole reason he had reemerged in my thoughts was the small black notebook he extracted during class one day from the inner left-hand breast pocket of his sports jacket. Holding it in his upraised hand and scanning the class with his captivating eyes, he told us it was where he recorded all the things he wanted to do before he died.
From my perspective as a 17-year-old, I judged him to be in his late 50s. Although he wore glasses and his short, thinning hair displayed distinct streaks of gray, I figured he had enough life left in him to scratch a good many entries in his notebook.
Coincidentally, I replaced Mr. Balmer as the campfire medicine man at a summer camp for boys near Haliburton in northern Ontario. The weekly activities were marked with the program director’s own perception of the “Indian way of life,” and culminated every Saturday night with a campfire ceremony involving senior counselors as key braves of an imagined Indian village.
After relinquishing his role as shaman at Camp Sherwood Forest, which coincided with his retirement, Mr. Balmer I imagined continued happily to check off his notebook entries for many, many years.
No sooner had I ended telling the story, and confessing my desire to own a notebook like Mr. Balmer’s, when my kind friend reached underneath her desk and presented me with a thin green box. And after striding across her office to a credenza behind where I sat, while prodding me to open her gift, she took a black pen from a drawer.
By this time I had opened the box and was gazing at an attractive brown leather cover with a notepad inside. Handing me the pen, my friend urged me to record the first entry of things I wanted to do.
Due to my resolve to follow Mr. Balmer’s example, I had thought about what I would include on such a list. And having been prodded to record my first want, I took the pen and wrote: “Visit Switzerland at least one more time.”
It seems like a simple enough wish, but one filled with a mountain full of my memories and emotions. Switzerland is where, as a boy, I skied my first downhill run, took my first communion, smoked my initial forbidden cigarette, hiked my first mountain and experienced death at close quarters for the first time. An older fellow student had drowned during a supervised group swim. It happened in a lake near the renowned (throughout most of Western Europe) Benedictine monastery and school of Einsiedeln where I was then enrolled.
A lengthy list of other remembered experiences connects me to the land of William Tell, the Jungfrau and echoes of the alpenhorn, and all justify the first entry in my own leather-covered notebook of things I want to do before time runs out on me.
Frank L. Kaplan is a retired University of Colorado professor who writes from Wheat Ridge, Colo. kaplanfăcolorado.edu
