When I was 13 years of age, the Governor of Florida visited our high school. This would not have been notable if our school had been large or famous or politically connected, but it was none of these things. It was a relatively unknown institution tucked away in the south-central part of the Sunshine State, a sleepy school in a small Southern town set among broad pastures and vast orange groves that rolled like the sea in every direction, ending only when they collided with the heat-tinged horizon.
        Sebring High School, in those days, was a ratty plaster palace in the process of dissolution. It teetered on the verge of collapse like a worn-out convict on death row, awaiting its hour of condemnation; yet it would not go quietly into that night. The old building had a bad case of the shakes. It sweated dust like bullets, shed termite scrabble like dust as it fretted against the day when it would melt, like Oz's witch, down into the earth from whence it came.