Bringing Salome the head of John the Baptist.

And LAWD, is my fine brass platter messy.

When I was a wee uniform-bedecked larva attending my hopelessly back-to-the-'50s parochial school in Northwestern New Jersey, I remember vividly the day in fourth grade when we got our new "Music Appreci-A-TION!" teacher. She was small but pleasantly round, like a freshly-dug-out-of-the-steppe hamster. She smiled a lot. She opened her mouth to speak and the furtive, horrified glances began shooting across the construction-paper encrusted classroom.

One of them there foreigners!

Of course, the fact that we all knew her long before she became our music mistress was utterly lost to most. She was the mother of one of my childhood best friends, Carmen. Ms. Drahl was born in Columbia. [hopelessly exotic!] Carmen was, of course, simultaneously beside herself and perishing from embarassment. In the meantime, things had gotten serious. Mrs. Drahl, the Happy-Go-Lucky Lunch Mom and Mrs. Drahl the Pinching-You-On-the-Cheeks Chaperone for Incessantly Evil Field Trips (who ALWAYS had candy!) had now become

THAT WOMAN NOBODY UNDERSTANDS.

Nothing had changed about her except her position in our candy-swilling pathetic pre-pubescent lives, filled as they were with the evil that would one day be our motor. Yet the moment she stepped foot in our class, poor Mrs. Drahl became the butt of every viscious slam imaginable. When she inadvertently rolled her R's, normally reserved good Catholic schoolgirls would nearly perish in fits of fiendish delight, coming close to shearing their tongues off with their razor-honed teeth rather than indecently guffaw. The hellish among us would call Carmen's house just to hear Mrs. Drahl yell up the stairs to her daughter: Carrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmen! Then, the hangup. I think Mrs. Drahl invented Caller ID to find our sorry asses for more tangible punishment than the strings of Hail Mary's and Our Father's that we were given to wash away the filth in our nasty little souls.

Of course, I could easily attribute all of that to the fact that yes, we were children, and yes, children are scions of the Hooved One, and yes, we all grew up just fine in spite of apparently being budding Hitler Youth. But no! Flash to Domonic's Undergraduate at the University of Maine!

So! The University of Maine. Resting on the banks of the mighty Stillwater River and nestled in forests that were ancient when John Smith landed on the rockbound shores pf the Pine Tree State, the University of Maine is the clarion hope for a state whose population has as of yet to break two million. [Little known Maine fact: Maine is the least densely populated state East of the Mississ'ip.] Translation: twice a year, thousands of young men and women--some still wearing the crudely hewn-together pelts of woodland beasts--crawl out of the woods to attend their classes. To say that some of them have not been exposed to diversity of any kind would be like saying something gross happened at Bhopal. {Look it up.} Maine is so white that the whisper of ethnic and religious diversity won't reach us for 2.3 billion years, travelling at the speed of "rap."

Now!

In a tiny, cramped office on the second floor of Stevens Hall, a graying intellectual drinks oolong tea surrounded by hundreds of books. He's the first Vietnamese person to graduate from Harvard University, and he got all three of his degrees there. He was the cultural attache to Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War, and actually met Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong. He speaks twelve languages fluently and three passingly. He is now an attache to the Vietnamese Ambassador to the UN and to the U.S. How it is that he ended up teaching at a Land and Sea Grant college on the rim of the earth is a long story, but suffice it to say that I immediatley cleaved myself to him, taking every class he had to offer with shiny-eyed zeal and maddening fervor. Despite who this man is, and who he was, and who he always will be, there was always some random collection of hair and tissue who'd whine every day after class with a sound like one might imagine a rusty nail being pulled out of a rotten board would make.

I just don't UNDERSTAND people with accents! Can't he speak better English?

Inevitably the class dwindled in number throughout the semester; far be it from me to not protect this man's dignity with honor-killings. The forests surrounding Baumann-Nelson House are littered with dozens of scantily-clad coeds who'd dared to bleat like sheep about my mentor! Better English! HE WENT TO HARVARD THREE TIMES!

{Before I go on, a fun story about Ngo and I. Hahahahaha! Dr. Ngo! Anyway, one day I was in his office chatting with him about how I wanted to, uh, be like him when I grew up, and while talking to me he lifts his tiny body from his chair and crosses the room. He grasps my hand, and I barely had the time to think "Ohmigod! It's gonna be like one of them After School Specials!" before he removed my watch (on my left hand) and placed it on my right hand. He then sat down again, never having stopped in his train of thought for a moment. When he'd finished his thought, I politely asked him: wtf, mate? "Well, Dom, your watch was interrupting your qi. If your qi is interrpted, you cannot attain in this life that which you dream of." Out of sheer superstition, I have since that day always worn my watch on my right hand. You can never tell with these things. }

So yeah. The strange thing is, had Dr. Long been these people's frat brother or Scout Master, things would be different. Why is it that when, in an office or academic environment, people can't seem to wrap their minds around accents? And it's not just foreign accents! Let me tell you how one is looked at in North Carolina when one talks about one's dohyahd. Yes. Like you've just been found in possession of four hundred gaily-painted kitten skull rattles, that's how.

Why then this soap-box foray? Today at work (walk-ins: 66) one of the hourly employees asked me:

How do you understand these people? I never know what they're saying.

Of course, I crushed one of my molars trying not to laugh like one of those old bats who spat on Mussolini's swaying corpse in that Milanese marketplace. This is because

HE IS PAKISTANI. Outside Bloomington, he might as well be wearing a turban and carrying the head of an infidel for all the respect he's gonna get because of his accent.

Pot. Calling. Kettle. Aw shit, you're not short-bus riders, you get my point.

Or were ye?


I remain, as ever,

Dom