He Took the Browning Job for a Year or Two

I have kept the same pair of reading glasses since 2009, and my wife calls it a medical condition. Browning threw him a party.

The timeline is the joke, and he supplies most of it. In 1965 he came to Browning on a revisit day and still remembers the room and the teacher. By eleventh grade he had forgotten he had ever visited another school; his mother had to show him her notes. He studied physics, meant to be a professor, and took a math job at Browning in a recession, intending to stay a year or two.

He turned down Hunter College High School along the way, reasoning, he said, that he'd have twice the students for roughly the same salary, "so I said to heck with that."

In 1982 or 1983, by his own recollection in a student interview, he was teaching a first-period class on folding chairs in an apartment the school had acquired and not yet turned into a classroom. The headmaster walked in with a coffee and a Danish and sat down. He looked at the teacher's feet and said the shoes looked comfortable. Then he said they were ugly as hell. Pelz kept teaching.

That is the whole of Browning's tenure system as far as I can see: you get reviewed by your boss, in front of the boys, on your footwear, and you finish the lesson.

In 1989 he took over college guidance and built a database from day one, which he says was fifteen years before Naviance. As a college tour guide, he said, if another guide didn't show up, he could be there in eight minutes, out of bed. He now counsels the sons of boys he guided decades ago. "I call them my grandchildren," he says. He also took his own twin sons through it.

His philosophy fits on a sticky note. Boys don't always get into the colleges they think they want. "They get into the places they ought to be going." His Subaru's vanity plate says GRYTTE, Browning's spelling of what the head of school calls grit, "as the rest of the world insists."

The eldest's college counselor has known her for fourteen months. I asked whether she had a database. She said yes, and then asked me to stop emailing it.

I would like her to stay fifty years. I would like her to have strong views on my shoes. I would settle, honestly, for the plate.