When I was in the fourth grade, I had a wonderful teacher named Carmelita Celia. Her family was from Barcelona but she grew up in Brownsville, TX, just inside the border. She taught us Spanish (with a bit of a Catalan accent, b’s for v’s, etc), but more importantly, she taught us poetry, as in memorize and recite for a grade. Some were fun, like Casey at the Bat, and others significant, like On Flanders Fields, which I still recite a lot for any war rememberance. (ASCE Bridge Building competition in Auburn, GA. Driving back, we ended up in Vicksburg, MS on Memorial Day. As we drove through the battlefield, the gravestones had flags on them. We stopped on a hillside overlooking one of the cemeteries and I recited that. It made quite an impact, and one of the guys told me at a WES meeting a couple of years ago that that was the thing that impacted him the most on that trip. ) One of the poems we learned was “America for Me”. I often think of it whenever...