Apologies for my multi-day absence, and thanks for your patience. It was quite a weekend, and I need a little zen this morning—hence the pensive-looking Galapagos land iguana featured below.

My Friday involved helping a friend excavate her parents’ apartment the day after she had helped move them to an assisted-living facility—a private situation for my friend, so I won’t go into it, but it was a tough thing for all involved. That was followed on Saturday night by a book party for Arianna Huffington at the imperial townhouse of Tom and Kathy Freston, about which more later.

And yesterday, one of my oldest friends and I traveled back to Groton, our high school, to attend the memorial service of our old friend, Rogers V. Scudder. “Mr. Scudder,” to us, died a few weeks ago of pneumonia, I think, but he was almost 94 years old, so you could probably just call it old age.

He lived a quietly remarkable life. Born in 1912 in St. Louis, he graduated from Harvard in 1934, earned a diploma in classical archeology from Oxford in 1955, and got a master’s from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1958. During World War II, he served as an ambulance driver. In the 1960s, he and collaborator Charles Jenney, Jr. wrote a four-volume series of Latin textbooks that would become the best-selling Latin texts in the country for 20 years. From 1976-1983, he served as the director of the Library at the American Academy in Rome.

But really, Mr. Scudder was a teacher, and for we students who didn’t know the details of his biography, that’s how we thought of him—as a teacher and friend. He taught at the Brooks School in Massachusetts from 1934 to 1966, when he retired for the first time. Brought to Groton to fill in for a teacher on leave, Mr. Scudder stayed on as a teacher of Latin and part-time dormmaster until 2005, when he was 92.

He was perhaps the kindest person I have ever known, and at a boarding school, where the social life can be brutal and escape difficult, his warmth was much needed and much appreciated. He was self-deprecating and funny and a gentleman in the best sense of the word; his grace and manners were extended to all, even those who did not immediately appreciate them. He tended to turn a blind eye toward harmless misbehavior—someone told a nice story of Mr. Scudder taking a group of students out to dinner and ordering them all a beer, and then, midway through the evening, remembering that they weren’t supposed to drink. “Oh, well,” he chuckled. “Just one then.” Mr. Scudder’s laughter and his generosity created the best kind of incentive for positive behavior; you didn’t want to disappoint him. You wanted to make him proud.

The actor Sam Waterston, who also attended Groton, was Mr. Scudder’s godson; Waterston’s parents taught at Brooks, and knew Mr. Scudder there. Waterston spoke yesterday of Mr. Scudder’s humility, which was profound, and of its rarity in our modern culture. He spoke of how Mr. Scudder taught him the meaning of perspective, without which we so easily slide into egocentrism; perhaps, Waterston suggested, this is a trait that comes from having lived through two world wars. And he spoke of the importance of teachers, of people who devote their lives to the instruction of others. As one of the school’s teachers said to me afterward, “That was good of him. It’s not the kind of thing another teacher could have said of Rogers, because it would have looked self-aggrandizing, but it’s true.”

We couldn’t be too sad at our loss; 93 is a ripe old age, and Mr. Scudder lived his life brilliantly, with dignity and grace and, for a remarkably long time, wisdom. But we can be sad that there are fewer and fewer like him.