After that first meeting, Mrs. Fleming and I worked together for more than two decades both in England and Switzerland. I had the privilege of serving as a TASIS headmaster for sixteen of those years. When my wife, Sharon, and I returned to the United States in 1998, we still remained close to Mrs. Fleming and TASIS. Little did we imagine in 1998 that fate would offer us another opportunity to work alongside Mrs. Fleming. Less than one year after retiring as headmaster of The Pennington School in New Jersey, I received a call asking if I would consider serving as interim headmaster in Lugano for the 2007/08 school year. While Sharon and I were considering this opportunity, we received a message from Mrs. Fleming on our answering machine. After expressing her best wishes and her love, Mrs. Fleming ended her message with, “...please, please, please give TASIS one more year.” How could we possibly say “no?!” The opportunity to spend more time with Mrs. Fleming was a key factor in my decision to leave retirement. What a gift this year proved to be! Perhaps the most vivid memory of Mrs. Fleming that I have from this interim year in Lugano occurred at the annual Christmas service held in St. Abbondio. Because concerns were expressed about whether Mrs. Fleming would be strong enough to deliver her traditional reading of St. Paul’s “First Letter to the Corinthians,” I was asked to give the reading. Unfortunately, no one had discussed or cleared this plan with Mrs. Fleming. Although I wasn’t present when Mrs. Fleming was informed of this change, I’m told that her response was something along the lines of “I’m NOT dead yet!”
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