The impossible works out for simple, humble people — like me. When I was in high school I was all science, going to get a physics degree from an engineering college, going to get a Nobel Prize. But all my avenues shut down.

I floundered. Not only was I partially color-blind, but I tried to serve God, and he wouldn’t have it. I sat and thought. Who had been my first teachers? (the nuns) What had they taught me of value? They taught the little Swiss boy English — again! So why didn’t I become an English teacher? Yes, here was a little foreigner who wanted to become an English teacher!

He did his job for forty-one years and then, suddenly, he became an author of a book on raising children, an author of YA books, a novelist, a science writer, a religious writer, and now a blogger. Do go to gewkey.com . That website is part of the supreme mystery of the universe, beyond the dark matter, beyond the Milky Way, beyond the black holes, at peace among the daffodils, the dandelions, the crickets and the alpine goats.

My first book, Raising Your Future, lay on her dining room table, probably ordered during Christmas week. I had stopped by to deliver a grocery order that I had offered to get for her, since Scrapple is not easy for non-Southerners to find in the North. She was the lady who had brought AMI Montessori schools to Long Island, and had rebuilt a Levittown edifice, a building probably valued at a million dollars. She is now ninety-one.

I don’t know what will become of that building once it is sold, but the northern Levittown neighborhood where it is located has recently received a boost in status with the opening of a well-designed church in that West Village Green area. The Maria Montessori School has contributed to the quality of Levittown education and to that of Long Island’s south shore, many graduates now buttressing this civilization as far away as Australia.

So it was satisfying to see that my book was still being read by people in the know, and was having an effect, perhaps into the distant future, and what I wrote for the people of Levittown (my son included) has reached a goal.

“God be wi’ ye” — that’s the original meaning of good-bye. We’ve come a long way since those days, but people still put a lot of heart into a departure. A fellow at church gave me a small pouch with a silver-looking rosary as a departing gift. He was moving to Pittsburgh, and had been the leader of a group that dedicated five decades of that prayer to Christ’s mother every Friday. He leaves behind a transformation, which I believe in, for I take the spiritual seriously.

Have I not mended my erring profligacy? Have I not contributed to an other’s betterment? Only the secret books of the universe contain all those answers, and unfortunately I don’t yet read the muons and hieroglyphics of what is scanned by the naked eye.

I know God uses unworthy rascals to accomplish his ends (look at our political system), but if I need to make my mark that way, so be it. I owe so much to that mysteriousness behind the wonders I have seen, and believe you me, I am not at all overly credulous. Let me leave it at that.

I used to sell books at the annual East Hampton Library book fair (a charity) and it was an opportunity to mix with the hoi polloi (the elite). That’s what the Greek word means now, here in New York, though the original meaning was the opposite, the masses. The director of the library in the beginning called on me because I was a new, Long Island author, and I sold quite a few books, no profit there, but I got to be known. I never got invited to the dinners afterward; that was reserved for the well-known authors.

That’s unlike me, to look at the negative side. I love the avenues opened to me through writing and research–they take me into unexplored fastnesses of the universe. The one time Loretta came with me, after it was over, we went to the McDonald’s in South Hampton. The child that grew up to be the man who’s inspired me had no Burger King (that’s also in South Hampton) but he was the highest royalty I know.

I’m sure that’s not the original name of the beautiful ruined abbey in North Yorkshire, England. I mean before Henry VIII’s lust caused him to break with the Church and suppress all the monasteries, convents and abbeys in England. Thomas More was the only one to stand up to him, and England lost its chance to become the leading nation in Western Civilization.

Sic transit gloria mundi, thus passes the glory of the world, the Romans would say. All is forgiven, but the damage remains. Just look at the glorious arches, painfully constructed in 1132, still glowing in the e’en light. We all wreak havoc when we are misguided, and though all is forgiven, the damage remains.

Comes the day of my dissolution, I pray that I don’t leave a legacy like that. Let me rather undo the harm that somebody else has done. That’s a more constructive use of my time.