Miss Dorothy Dwenger — this was long before the advent of “Ms.” — was my third grade teacher.

I appreciate her more and more as the years unfold and I mature into my own incipient agedness recognizing how enduringly informed I have been by her skillful guidance.

An online search turned up a death notice from 1959. So, she lived for only two more years after I had her, or shall I say, she had me.

The yellowed clipping said she died suddenly. I don’t recall any notice paid to her passing in the elementary school where she began her career in 1929 and was still teaching when she passed away, when I was only in the fifth grade.

I am saddened, now, to not have known then. Sometimes sheltering children from awareness of life’s natural and inevitable sorrows can leave deeper scars than compassionately including them in its full circle.

Perhaps the other teachers were uncertain about how to share this news with their pupils. Ironically, I think Miss Dwenger could have managed it gracefully.

I also learned a few other details of her life that I would not have known at the age of 8. She lived with her sister, a nurse, in an apartment a few miles from the school.

Art Carney, the marvelous actor and comedian, had evidently lived in my neighborhood and had been her student about 20 years before I came along. “Hey, Ralphy baby!”

In retrospect, she became my favorite teacher because I have recognized over many long years how many things I still know, how so many fields of lifelong interest and learning were introduced or catalyzed by her choices of lessons and her kind and inventive ways of inspiring and encouraging us.

She did not need to insist or threaten. She galvanized curiosity and enthralled with story-telling. I don’t remember her speaking other than softly.

She introduced us to classical composers, playing 78-rpm records and teaching us to appreciate and identify Bach and Mozart, Chopin and Grieg, Humperdinck (whom I at first remembered as “Pumpernickel”), and her beloved Edward MacDowell.

Do you know the enchanting piano music of MacDowell, one of the great 19th-century American composers whose compositions prefigured the new musical directions of the 20th century while emerging from the distinctly American songbook of Stephen Foster and others? If not, listen to his “Woodland Sketches,” “Sea Pieces” and “New England Idylls,” and prepare to be enchanted.

We learned to identify the constellations, drawing charts and pictures, and when I gaze up into the infinite firmament I still hear Miss Dwenger’s soft and patient voice telling us that we were now entering the imagination of the ancient Greek astronomers. While honoring them, we must use their vision to open the door of our own imaginations and not simply paint over the mysterious sky with their projections.

Will any others remember Dean Marshall’s classic children’s chapter book “The Long White Month?” If you can find a precious copy in the library or a used bookshop, just get it and read it to or with an 8-year-old as she read it, chapter by chapter, to our class. Here you will find a tender story of orphaned Priscilla who discovered the joy of feeding the birds during a winter of dislocation in New England.

At this equinoctial time of year, as the chickadee leaves behind its cackle and chants “pee-wee” at my feeders, I thank Dorothy Dwenger for illuminating the fascinating world of bird life, and so much more.

We walked in the school yard and local streets and learned to tell oaks from maples, cherry and tulip trees, by bark and leaf. She did not draw the crisp distinctions between responding emotionally to the natural world and cultivating a scientific discernment.

This was perhaps why, for me, she was such an effective and affecting teacher. Esthetic, emotional, and intellectual perceptual qualities are all ways of being humanly present to life and need not be separated into mutually exclusive ways of engagement.

Wonder need not dissolve into analysis. These can flourish together, and when they do they enliven our spirit and nurture our humanity.

Now when I think of kind, wise, gentle Miss Dwenger, I see her in her navy blue skirt and pressed white blouse, her soft aquamarine eyes beneath her stunning halo of white hair, smiling benignly.

Yet in these recent weeks, I have inevitably been driven to imagine her drawing a loaded gun from her handbag, dropping into a military combat crouch, brutal intent coursing through her overheated bloodstream, charged by the school administrators with the responsibility to slaughter a homicidal maniac stalking the hallways of our elementary school. Do you suppose this capacity abided in her lovely, gentle soul?

This is madness, in the name of American greatness, so hideous as to shame the most benighted among those who ask us to consider such a grotesquerie, were these ones capable of shame at all.

Jonathan Klate, of Amherst, writes about the relationship between spiritual consciousness and political ideology.