Frank Thoms

I contemplated my insistence on returning to School N. 185 on my own. Had I been foolish in thinking I could inveigle my way in, simply because I wanted to? How often have I acted without taking others into consideration? How often have I ignored realities around me? My decision to follow the Rune, to consider the uses of adversity, provoked me to explore my matryoshka, alone on the sixteenth floor of the Hotel Leningrad.

The question of my return had been a lack of communication from the beginning. When saying goodbye in the fall, I had no idea that appeals for me to return were out of the question. I felt bad thinking about the children who were acting as unintentional Pinocchios pleading for me to come back. I’m sure they thought it possible, as did their teachers. Why not? I’d been a teacher and a friend, an American who given his all for them.