I met old Wheelock again in the shrinking alley behind my college apologizing and wheezing as he always did to the passersby. I think I was touched by his classical gestures as he raised his hands to the air, monkeying, like once I saw, the Roman sword dances. And then he chortled, steely, and reproduced the full rainbow range of onomatopoetic grunts and hisses preserved in Cicero. "Ah, it's a pleasure," I began but he did not remember me. Fingering his polka dotted bow tie massively, he proceeded to lift up the rubbish of ages.
Same old latinized Wheelock, forcing us to conjugate and decline but never memorize the words that were exchanged across the Rubicon. And seeing his name plastered across the garbage truck made me nostalgic like nothing else.
 germanicus2 · Wed Apr 15, 2009 @ 12:16pm · 0 Comments |
