It did.
“Would you care to tell us how you came up with it?” asked Mr. Hunt.
The man settled back into the big chair, and we could see how small he really was.
“Spring 1952,” he said. “I was deployed in Europe, this is postwar—I was in the war, too, but I was sent back as part of a rebuilding effort in Belgium. I was homesick, more than during the war. I’m not afraid to admit that. I wasn’t homesick during the war. I got married in between, to my wife.”
He said the next part differently, and he looked out the window as he did: “June.
“I went again to earn extra money so we could build a family. I had my textbook job, and I could do that from anywhere, so this was like having two jobs. I was there ten months and one week before I was able to go home. I flew from Antwerp to London to New York—Idlewild, it was called then, the airport, before JFK died, before there was a JFK, well before JFK was JFK, anyway—and then to Chicago.
“Our home was in Columbus, Ohio. When I landed I phoned her from the airport and told her that I was taking the train right away from Chicago to Columbus, and it was only five hours away, she … June.
“She said she couldn’t wait that long, now that I was so close. Can you believe that? Five more hours, after ten months, and she said she couldn’t wait! She said she was going to hop on a train going toward me, too, and we would just have to meet in the middle. I said, June, that’s crazy! But she insisted. And the real crazy thing is, secretly, I had been thinking the same thing.
“You have to understand what it was to be separated from someone back then. You’re across an ocean; the world was just at war; now the Russians say they’re going to bury us with a shoe. There are no rules anymore. And there’s no telephone in your pants. You don’t get news very often, and when you do, your heart pounds because it might be bad news. After all that, we couldn’t take not being in sight of one another for a second more than we needed to.
“I did the math, and I kept doing it again and again on the train, how many minutes it would take to meet each other, estimating her train and my train at all these different speeds … Just looking at it every which way on the back of the train stationery envelope. They had stationery on trains back then—can you believe that? Everything was better then. Not everything,” he said, looking at Arush, “but so much. So many things. Anyway. I don’t know how I ever thought of it because I was only thinking about June, but I think your brain gets bigger at times like that because there was another part of my brain that thought, Boy, this would make one hell of a textbook problem.
“We met on the platform of the train station in Spencer, Ohio, exactly three hours and one minute after I got on the train, and we kissed for eleven minutes. They were the best eleven minutes of my life.”
The girls and even a couple of the boys in the class applauded. The best-looking boy in the class, Tyler, made eye contact with Amanda, the best-looking girl in the class, and they both mouthed Awwww together, as though the two of them together had somehow had something to do with this.
Maybe Amanda wasn’t the best-looking girl in the class. Maybe she was just the blondest.
“Wasn’t it two guys in the textbook?” said one of four kids in our class named Matt. “Not, like, a guy and a girl?”
“I changed that part. I thought if it was a man and a woman, kids would get distracted and not focus on the math. Two men was a simpler thing back then. And anyway,” said the man, “haven’t you ever heard of artistic license? The point is, it’s my life and my story. And it’s my problem.”
“It truly is a beautiful problem,” said Mr. Hunt. “I mean, the math problem—not your problem. Your problem, we all hope you resolve it and get what you deserve.”
“Thank you.”
“But just in case,” said Mr. Hunt, “look around at this classroom. Look. Generations of children have learned math from what you did, generations are a little bit smarter because of what you wrote. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“It’s nice,” said the old man. “But shouldn’t I be paid for it? If people are well paid for reality television and cotton candy and dunking a basketball, why can’t they be well paid for changing young minds? I mean, wouldn’t more people do it? Bright, selfish people? Nothing wrong with being selfish. If more people thought they could make a fortune curing cancer, wouldn’t more people be trying to do that?” He turned to Mr. Hunt. “You, I don’t need to explain this to you. You’re a teacher.”
Mr. Hunt smiled, a private type of smile that we all could see.
The old man made a lot of sense, except for the cotton candy reference. What was that about? Could you really make a lot of money that way? Maybe he knew someone who made a lot of money in candy. Or maybe he was just old, and you just had to ignore a few of the things he said to get to the wisdom.