Category: Emerging Whole

How I Became a Latin Lover – Over My Shoulder

My romance with Latin was far from love at first sight. It was a long and difficult romance that led me to major in Classics as an undergraduate and ultimately earn a PhD in Classics. The romance started in 9th grade, when I took Latin 1. My school offered a rigorous curriculum. In my freshman year (9th grade), I took both French and Latin, English, Algebra I, World History, and Old Testament (my required religion class). This course load exposed the deficiencies in my abbreviated education.

Algebra I proved to be very difficult. Doing my Algebra homework was so time consuming that I always started it first, as soon as I got home from school. I struggled particularly with how to set up and solve word problems. My previous math classes had not emphasized word problems. They were a new mystery for me to solve. I would toil and agonize over each problem. I often had to recopy my homework to make it presentable. The eraser holes, the grubby pencil marks and tear stains were not to be seen on the pristine paper that my teacher received.

Each day after completing my Algebra homework, I would tackle my Latin assignments. Latin is a fully inflected language with a flexible word order. I had no trouble learning the vocabulary portion of each new lesson. It was simply matter of learning new words. The declensions for nouns and adjectives were baffling and the conjugation and tenses for verbs added to the mystery sauce.

My teacher was an elderly nun who was very hard of hearing. At the time I was both timid and soft-spoken, quite afraid of making a mistake. The class terrified me. Instead of agilely reciting the declension or conjugation on command, my mind would blank and I would stumble along. I dreaded Algebra and Latin. My other classes came easily. My French teacher had no problem with my reluctance to speak up. Since the focus was on building vocabulary and simple grammar, I excelled.

End of the year exams were very important at my school. I made it through Algebra with surprising success. My nightly toil paid off. I solved the problems on the exam very satisfactorily. My Latin 1 exam was a meltdown. The teacher recognized that my exam did not reflect the usual quality of my work. It was so bad that I had to retake the exam. I worked hard and did very well on my second exam.

Latin 2 was far less difficult and demanding. Caesar’s wars intrigued me. I started to enjoy puzzling through a translation and was even able to recite in class with some fluidity. At the end of the year, I decided to take Latin 3 in my junior year. A different nun from my Latin 1 and 2 teacher taught Latin 3 and 4. She was medievalist so instead of reading Cicero and Vergil in Latin 3 and 4, the standard fare for third and fourth year Latin students, we read medieval authors. Dipping into the Middle Ages helped me understand the extent and significance of Latin literature.

I stopped taking French after my sophomore year and signed up to take Greek! It was an unusual opportunity. My school’s rector had been a student in Egyptology before becoming a priest. He read Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and hieroglyphics. He was brilliant. He also did calculus for enjoyment and taught my fourth-year math class. I was the only student brave enough to take Greek. It was a wonderful experience. I learned Homeric Greek and in Greek 1 read Book 1 of the Iliad. The next year, I took Greek 2 and was introduced to Herodotus and read the first book of his Histories. It was fascinating.

When I got to college, I had already had four years of Latin and two years of Greek. I had no intention of pursuing a degree in Classics. I expected my troubled romance with Latin would end with satisfying my college foreign language requirement. I wanted to study Botany, but that was not to be.

Freshman placement exams were a bit of misery for me. My college required every incoming student to take a speech test. Each student had to read a paragraph aloud for a group of teachers. If you passed the test, you were exempt from taking a speech class; otherwise, you had to sign up for and pass the speech course before graduation.

By the time I entered college, I had developed a nasty stutter from all the stress and pressure to achieve academic success. The panel of speech testers didn’t even let me get three sentences into the paragraph, before I was signaled to stop reading. It soon became clear that there was in fact a third option. If a student could not qualify for speech class, the student was assigned to speech clinic. There was no credit given for speech clinic.

I received a notice that I had to go to speech clinic. In a way it was a blessing. The college had a robust speech pathology department. My visits to the speech clinic reduced my stutter and taught me many tactics that I’ve used to reduce my stutter and speech anxiety. I took the required speech class my sophomore year, with the clinic’s blessing, and was able to fulfill my graduation requirement.

The language placement was a big surprise. My four years of Latin qualified me for the most advanced class. This meant that I would only have to take one year of Latin to satisfy the college’s language requirement. I expected to break off my troubled romance with Latin by the end of my freshman year. It seemed like a great idea. The class was Latin poetry – Catullus, Ovid and Horace. It was magic. It came easily for me. The teacher was engaging and made each line of the poems glow. It was my easiest course. I looked forward to class and did my assignments eagerly. All my toil started to pay off. My final exam was a breeze. What I did not expect was a letter from the department acknowledging how well I had done and recommending that I take the second half of the poetry course and sign up for another higher-level poetry class. How much higher quickly became apparent. The University had just started offering a graduate degree in Classics. The advanced class was a graduate-level (500) course. I was assured that if I still decided to major in some other discipline, the upper level Latin class would simply count as a part of my electives. I signed up for the class. I had fallen in love with Latin poetry. Thus, the romance began in earnest. I became a Latin lover.

Dating, The Rules Were Never Fun – Over My Shoulder

Once I entered college, I finally had some agency over my life and activities. Getting my driver’s license gave me freedom to go where I wanted to. It was as if I had slipped my leash. However, unlike a dog let off its leash, I was expected to be equipped to make excellent important life choices without any practice. This was particularly difficult in the social realm.

College life in the 1960s was alcohol soaked. My mother was a non-drinker, and my father infrequently enjoyed a gin and tonic in the summer and the occasional glass of wine. Marijuana was just starting to move into the scene my last year in college, so I did not have drugs to contend with, just alcohol. In an odd way I was blessed to be so young when I entered college. The age to buy liquor in New Jersey was 21, so I was never legal until after I graduated. In neighboring New York, the legal age was 18. What little social life I enjoyed, it was mostly spent in New Jersey.

My freshman year I worked most weekends at the convent retreat house, so my activities were threaded into the occasional weekends when the nuns did not have a retreat scheduled and did not need my help.

As a product of an all-girls convent high school, I did not have the opportunity to interact with boys other than through my family. My all-girls school had very few coed events, and they were carefully choreographed. A busload of girls would be sent all dressed up to a nearby boys boarding school. Then, the social chairman arbitrarily matched the girls with blind dates from a group of boys from the boys’ school. These “dates” were often very disappointing. On the bus ride we usually took up a collection, a pot, that would be awarded to the girl who got the worst date. Being very young and socially awkward made me a front-runner for winning the pot. My quarter, the ante for the pot, would give me a nice return on my investment, but it did nothing for my self-image.

In junior high school grades, the school sponsored ballroom dancing classes. For these events, the girls lined up in chairs on one side of the gym and an equal-sized group of boys would sit on the other side of the gym. The dance instructor and her partner would demonstrate the dance steps. Then the dance instructor would select a partner for each girl by height and ability to practice the dance. I did learn to foxtrot, waltz, jitterbug and cha-cha – all dances rapidly fading into obscurity. One year I enjoyed going to church-sponsored monthly square dances. I enjoyed learning to square dance, but after one year my church stopped offering square dance nights much to my disappointment. In college and beyond I discovered that I really liked social dancing. What had been a chore to learn became fun.   

Any function that was not school sponsored came with a whole lot of restrictive rules. My old-fashioned Italian father insisted that anyone I went out with even for a movie or a ballgame had to be first approved by my older brother and then by my parents. For all events that were not directly school sponsored, my brother was expected to tag along. He either went to the same event or brought along a date that he had chosen.

This was stifling and had a very dark side. It was not until I got to college that I realized that my brother had dwarfed my social life. One evening I ran into a fellow on campus who was a friend of my brother. During our brief conversation, he mentioned that he had always wanted to go out with me. I asked him why he didn’t because I would have enjoyed dating him. He told me that honestly my brother was like a dragon, and no one would go near his sisters for fear of angering the dragon. This squared with the awkward conversations that I had with my brother’s friends when they came to the house. I assumed that I was unattractive and uninteresting. This damaged my teenage self-image.

The dark side was that if my brother needed to fix up one of his friends, I could be immediately called into service. I remember going to several questionable parties with blind dates fixed up by my brother. I did not always like his friends, but there was a small measure of safety in that he would always be there if I needed him. Per his dictum, I was never to discuss the party or date other than to say that it was fun lest he cut me off from ever going out again with him.

Once I got to college my brother’s grip on my social life loosened. I carefully chose my own circle of friends. In hindsight I realize that my judgement was quite sound, for the only truly bad experiences I had in college were the result of following someone’s recommendation and not my own judgement.

In college, most of my dates were with fellows I met through my church or my participation in the model UN sponsored by Princeton. My church activities included a weekly bag lunch at the rector’s house on the men’s campus. It was open to commuting students from both men’s and women’s campuses. We also had a Thursday early morning service with breakfast afterward. I often went to this service, enjoyed a hot breakfast and got to my 8:00 a.m. class on time. There was also a Sunday evening prayer service followed by an evening meal. I often would study on campus Sunday afternoon to get ahead on my assignments, eat supper and go home ready to confront the week ahead. Over time I developed my own social network and grew to realize that I could and did make good decisions.

Keystone Events: Days One Never Forgets – Over My Shoulder

Everyone has a keystone event in their life. These events are the single most consequential event that one will never forget where they were or what they were doing when they either heard or witnessed them. Keystone events color one’s perception for years.

For me my keystone memory occurred on Friday, November 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was a freshman in college.  Since then I have experienced several memorable events that I realize were the keystone event for those around me. In 1986 I was making a sales call at a school when the Challenger explosion occurred. The students were watching on a big tv in the cafeteria. I am sure that for many of these high school students, this was their keystone event. For me it was memorable, but not my keystone event.

Similarly, for another slightly different generation, the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was a traumatic keystone event. I remember well where I was that bright September morning. I was in my office in Boston. I had just turned on my computer when the first plane hit. The rest of the day melted away. For most of my colleagues who were 10-20 years my junior, this was perhaps the most significant memorable event in their lives — a keystone.

As I noted above, I was a freshman in college when John F. Kennedy was shot. I can still recall with absolute clarity how that day unfolded. My freshman English composition class met in the basement of the college chapel right after lunch on Fridays. It was a sunny, warm day for November, and my classroom was uncomfortably warm. The professor was not in attendance. A substitute came by at the start of the class and put the assignment on the blackboard. We were to write an in-class essay: an analysis of John Donne’s Meditation XVII.

This profound essay reflects on mortality and the interconnectedness of humanity. The image of the funeral bell tolling and Donne’s words to ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee were very moving for me. Throughout high school the bells for chapel, the beginning and end of the school day and the evening angelus had been comforting routine sounds. The essay invoking the funeral bells spoke to me in many ways. The essay’s reminder of the interconnectedness of humanity and that we should all recognize our mortality was a powerful message.

As I was finishing writing my essay, I could hear a radio voice coming from down the hall in the janitor’s closet. As I dropped off my essay and walked down the hall, I heard the news of the assassination of JFK in Dallas. I was very shaken and felt I needed a moment to gather myself before I went to my next class. It was a short walk across campus, but I chose to walk a slightly longer route across campus. It took me by an athletic field that overlooked the Raritan River where I stood for a few moments reflecting upon Donne’s words and the events in Dallas.

I arrived at my next class just as one of the other students was telling the professor what had just happened. At first the professor thought that the student was mistaken or making up a story. She left to go check on what was going on. Still stunned, I simply took my usual seat and expected the lesson to commence upon her return. Instead, she came back into the classroom with tears streaming down her face and scrawled on the blackboard – class cancelled. I was quite relieved since my own thoughts were quite scrambled. I knew that I needed time to process the events of the day. I left the campus and drove home. I had been looking forward to the weekend since I did not have to go to convent to work. It was one weekend when there was no retreat scheduled. I spent the weekend like many Americans glued to the television filled with sadness and horror. This was for me the most memorable event of my young adult life, my keystone event.