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I was a sophomore in High School in 1982, at the height of Erno Rubik’s slick-fingered stranglehold on Western culture. His eponymous puzzle was everywhere, including my book bag.

The teacher of my Introductory Physical Sciences class, a bookish old Jesuit who wore tinted eyeglasses and whistled when he spoke, had already earned major points with the class by conducting a wood-distillation experiment in which one team of distracted amateur scientists had inadvertently shot a flaming section of tongue depressor across the room with a startling bang. He put himself into my hall of fame by taking a Friday off of the usual curriculum to teach us all how to solve Rubik’s Cube.

He distributed a one-page solution, which he’d typed up and mimeographed. (Check out the purple ink! If you’re my age, you’ll remember the sharp chemical smell, and that damp flaccid feeling that contradicts every sense of the phrase hot off the press. But, forgive an old man, I digress.)

I know not whether his work was original. Two solutions had been published by then, according to Wikipedia, although I would not be surprised if my professor had spent a few long evenings in the J.S. residence, peering through dark glasses at the bright cube, working out his own algorithms.

His steps are presented longhand, e.g. “front clockwise.” My pencilled shorthand is a variation of what I learned tonight has come to be called “cube notation.” Whether this shorthand was my invention or my teacher’s, I don’t remember; the official cube notation, introduced (acc. to Wikipedia) by David Singmaster in his 1980 publication Notes on Rubik’s Magic Cube, uses a prime mark rather than the “-1” I used to indicate counter-clockwise rotation. Had Singmaster’s book been the source of my teacher’s solution, I imagine he would have presented the notation as well.

Then, too, there’s the enigmatic description of the 12-step “Rubik’s Maneuver,” which Google finds only six references to — all of which are in Japanese. Had that phrase appeared in one of the published solutions, one would expect it to have propagated into the community, quotes intact. But no.

My personal best time was on the order of 65 seconds, according to the sweep second hand on the oven clock, before which I would perch on the kitchen stool for a few minutes of what passed for speed-cubing before the M*A*S*H reruns started. This was of course for the 3x3x3 cube; the 4x4x4 was a travesty of human puzzle-solving ability, as far as I was concerned. (Yes, I have seen the videos of Frank Morris solving a 5x5x5 in 1 minute 46 seconds, but clearly he’s not human.).

I took my cube apart during that quest for speed, and swabbed the guts with Vaseline — yet another Cube-born instance of simultaneous invention. But I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to improve on the basic algorithms, aside from one maneuver I discovered by manipulating a solved cube — it did a nifty job of orienting and permuting a fairly common combination of final edge pieces in fewer moves than prescribed by the ditto sheet. Unfortunately, the mnemonic for this maneuver escapes me.

The other formulas I can recite to this day, although I had no recollection of how to apply them until I found the original solution sheet (pictured above) during a garage-purging exercise. Under it was my original, much worn and beloved circa-1981 Rubik’s Cube. My immediate thought was to work through the solution again in silent tribute to the best day of my Jesuit education.

Unfortunately, 20 years’ worth of neglect and Vaseline residue had taken a toll; the adhesive on several of the Cube’s colored decals had been eaten away.

Two great resources for Cube aficionados: Wikipedia’s Rubik’s Cube article, and this amazing algorithm playback applet, which apparently takes any Cube notation as a URL argument, reverses it out of a solved cube, and then plays it back. Drag the cube to rotate it in three dimensions — amazing!