My ancient history professor was a contemporary of Herodotus,
an anachronism in knock-off Birkenstocks,
a scatterbrained over-analytical astronaut-pagan
garden-hippie
so to speak
whose point I missed or deflected until
two years ago when I thought about it
three years after he had begun his new career
as food for the hippie-garden flora
he frequently brought to work
in the form of pollen and petals on his “BORN AGAIN PAGAN”
t-shirt –
sometimes it floated arbitrarily onto the lectern
like some sort of lesson in infinite time + probability
landing in unusual patterns
that looked like words
that the Christian Conservative in the second row
took to be a sign from God.
His back was hunched like he had been developing a
comprehensive philosophy
about floors
for many years.
He used to say things like:
I hate Wal-Mart
but they sell cheap pens.
He used to tell us that the Torah
was the sequel to Gilgamesh
and that burgers joints are holier than alters.
The kid in second row disagreed.
I thought it was an interesting theorem
but reached no verdict.
One time he tripped and dented his beard –
his third wife had to drop him off for class
and we all thought maybe she had beat him up. At least I
thought that.
Most of the rest of the class thought about football and
pussy.
Except the Christian kid –
he probably thought about piety, paradise,
converting this dirty bearded dirt-worshiper to the Light
and somewhere in the back of his Id
he surely thought about that girl in the first row.
His wife stuck around and listened to his lecture
about America’s serial monogamy –
my mind drifted and I ended up joining my classmates
in the end zone.
Later in the semester
he gave me an A- on an essay he never read
which soured me to his antics a little bit
but that same class he did posit a speculative
quantification
of how much hanky-panky took place in the pews of medieval
churches
because the priest had his back turned away from the flock
who couldn’t understand Latin anyway:
infinite time + probability (again).
The Christian Conservative kid hated him
but I thought he was okay
although I sometimes wonder whose afterlife
he now inhabits
and how the hell
I’m ever going to know.
Published by
The View From Here
Issue 35
May 2011
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