It was a big gamble. And, young as I was, I realized it was a crapshoot. No doubt about it. And I had plenty of time to change my mind and didn’t.

I became brave.

Ms. Eidlitz was my English teacher at Dobbs, a woman who was both cynic and scholar. She taught Greek myths, from a book compiled by Edith Hamilton, and also poetry introducing us to the likes of Shelley and E.E. Cummings. She also taught us an awareness that we were living in a world of half-truths and bad poetry and craven behavior. She expected better of us, end of discussion.

For our final exam, which lasted two hours, she asked us to answer four of the following seven questions. I will make this up, because I cannot truly recall the exam, since it was nearly a half-century ago, when I was a skinny and shy little girl of fourteen. Bear with me.

Discuss the tragedy behind Ozymandias, King of Kings.

Compare a Roman myth with a comparable Greek myth.

Expound upon the fatal flaw of Icarus as he flew close to the sun.

Stuff like that.

I wrote but one sentence: “None of the following are questions.”

And then I sat there, at that wooden desk, for two hours, watching my little life flash before my eyes.

Could I really just write that one sentence and hope that Ms. Eidlitz would be proud that one of her students actually heard all that she had taught so well? Or would I be thrown out of school, shamed, with an F on a final exam?

It was hot in that classroom, I remember that. May or June. If there were mosquitoes I would have heard their engines. If I had experienced puberty, I would have felt sweat run down my back. My ears surely heard my heart.

I didn’t dare move, enveloped as I was in the noise of scratching fountain pens and fluttering pages in small blue books.

I was truly “a traveler in an antique land.” The “frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command” felt near. I experienced elation and despair.

Ms. Eidlitz came through. She held up my untouched blue book in class a week later and announced that she bestowed her only A+ to a student who only wrote one sentence. The class was dead silent.

For one brief moment I was Ozymandias, King of Kings, and the sand had yet to reclaim my body.