In the spring following my first year of teaching Kindergarten I began my Master’s Degree in English Literature.  I dragged myself out of bed to be at the university at the eight a.m. class.  Milton’s “Paradise Lost” was the size of a dictionary and the Bible.  The class was titled Victorian Literature.  My goal was to get the degree and move on to Columbia to get a Ph.D. while writing the next great American Novel.  I loved teaching Kindergarten, but at 22 I still hung on to my dream of what I wanted to do in life.

I met a fellow teacher.  Dating him cast a pall on my objective in life.  I burned the candle at both ends by dating the man I eventually married and reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”  This masterpiece of English poetry was beyond my comprehension.  Milton dictated this poem after becoming blind in 1652. He dictated it while at the home of a famous painter of the era:  Mihaly Muncasy.

I was lost in “Paradise Lost” and knew I had a major writing assignment ahead of me in that literature class.  I remember laying on a blanket in the shade of an enormous tree with the massive book opened to a mere 70 pages.  Tired, I fell asleep with my head on the open book.  When I awoke I wondered if I had absorbed some of “Paradise Lost” by sleeping on the open book with my head upon it.

It did not, by the way.  I wrote an essay in spite of my brain’s incapability to comprehend the poem.  It came back to me, bleeding red ink with a dismal grade.  I saw the essay and began to cry in class.  The professor followed me out the door at the end of class as I wiped my nose on my sleeve.  We went to coffee in the student lounge.  Bless his soul, he told me to drop his class.  This sank my ego and my dream.

He had, however, read my file from the sister university I attended briefly until my dad quit paying my tuition.  I had been a writing major with a scholarship.  My grades were excellent and commentary about my writing had impressed him.  He told me that I was not a literature major.  But, he said:  “You are a writer.”

The man I was dating was Charles Muncatchy.  We married the following summer. One day there was a big family gathering at a park.  A cousin of my husband had brought copies of the biography about their famous ancestor Mihaly Muncasy, the artist.  It rang a bell in my addled brain.  “Paradise Lost” was written at Muncasy’s summer estate!  I married into this artistic soup.  It was a gathering place for many artists of the era, Milton being one of them.

The irony hit me.  I still have not read “Paradise Lost”.  I can never expect my writing endeavors to reach the apex of anything Milton wrote.  But, in the end, it does not matter. We named our first son after Mihaly Muncasy:  Michael Muncatchy.  I had many opportunities to remember Milton by parenting Michael.