Doris King (1909-1992) was my High School English teacher in Whitehall, New York and was the most significant intellectual influence on my life, but not because of English. I was an average student with unusual interests. I read the works of existentialist writers, was interested in the theories of physics that challenged our perceptions of time and space, and held a deep belief and fear of God. I knew better than to talk to anyone about any of that. Over time I discovered that Doris had a lot to say about all of those topics.

Some of what I know about Doris I heard from her in high school, some I learned later. As a little girl she remembered her father’s conversations with Charles Steinmetz, whose discoveries in the physics of electricity revolutionized the General Electric Company. She told stories of her “Grampa Lippincott”, the Lippincott of Lippincott Publishing. She attended Miss Hall’s boarding school in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and Mount Holyoke College where she earned a Master’s Degree in Physics, studying under Dr. Elizabeth Laird. “Miss Laird”, as Doris called her, had studied in Berlin under the physicist Max Planck. I have no idea why Doris King became an English teacher in a tiny town in upstate New York.

I thought she was old when I met her in 1969. She lived alone, if you don't count her husband Charlie's ashes on the mantel, had a giant diamond engagement ring that she always wore, and would come to high school drama club work sessions wearing a fur coat. We talked about the mysteries of physics and the challenges of Christianity, and though she converted to Catholicism before she retired she was always uncertain that the physics of life might lead to reincarnation. She spoke to me once about her great regard for a chicken’s ability to pass an egg, and I was pretty sure she could talk to cats.

She was interesting, eccentric and crazy, qualities that overlapped like a venn diagram, but she validated my thinking. No. She validated my right to think. We had a brief conversation once about Alice in Wonderland as an analogy to the study of sub atomic physics that I assumed she forgot until years later when she gave me her copy of the book.  She was given it as a child, and it is signed “To Doris from Grandma Lippincott, Christmas 1917”. She also lent me a book she thought would interest me. It was “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis, in which a senior demon, Screwtape, writes a series of letters to Wormwood, his nephew and novice temptor on earth, as guidance in corrupting a human. I suspect that this is the genesis of The Final Coming.

What Doris taught me was that a person could be many things at once. That thinking about things beyond my experience was not just acceptable, it was a gift. She lived a quiet life with an extraordinary depth of knowledge and experience of which few were ever aware. I moved away to college and we spoke infrequently.  I believe that after her retirement she moved west and became the caregiver of a less fortunate older woman. In the cruelest of ironies, this brilliant woman with a rich personal history succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease and passed away in 1992.