Luna Moth Papers: Mirrors for One Another in Real Time: A 20-year Exchange of Letters with My Englis

Shortly after graduating from high school, David Cavagnaro began a correspondence with his 1957 high school freshman English teacher, Katherine Martin. Thus began a 20-year sojourn of mutual mirroring of life lessons, personal philosophies, and creative experience that was influenced by everything from the worldly-the tumultuous 1960s, the tragedy of the Vietnam War, David's conscientious objector appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, crises in education, the civil rights movement, the drug years, and the moon landing-to the very personal. David was in and out of marriages (which Kay already had been). They were both writing books. Relationships, raising children, evaluating life styles, the process of aging, the loss of loved ones, and especially sharing their creative lives, all became grist for their mutual mill.

At the end of their correspondence, Kay was 76, looking back over a life, the same age David is now, doing the same, exploring also his own life experience with the written word itself. For them both, this was a "love affair" of the most noble kind, a sharing of words of the heart, a full-circle inter-generational meeting of heart, mind, and spirit.