I will spare you details. Except to say that most recently I spent a year deep inside Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, then two years on Cardinal John Henry Newman, two years on Sir Walter Scott and am currently over a year into "the American Scott," James Fenimore Cooper.

I have been married for 45 years to Dr Mary Louise Klein, whose fields include German Literature, Linguistics and English as a Second Language. We live in Highland Farms Retirement Community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Buncombe County, North Carolina, county seat: Asheville. We have two sons and between them they have given us six grandsons and two granddaughters.

I am on the lookout for interactions among individuls nd groups such as Toastmasters, Epinions and Torch-IATC as instruments of informal education.

Thomas Patrick Killough/ AOHCAPABLANCA, August 22, 2009.