Life in the Corn Minion Number Seven: Magistra Poolensis.

Name: Magistra Poolensis; also, Ary-janemay Oolepay.
Location: Florence, Italy (p'raps the environs, but close). Nauseating, no?
Occupation: Formerly my Banguh High School Latin teacher; now Magistra works in Italy doing translation work from Italian and Latin into English, and vice-versa.
Object Magistra Possessed That All In Her Classes Coveted: A rubber stamp with a cow on it; the cow's marking was of the globe. With ten "cow" stamps for correct answers on "quizzies", you got to either not turn in a homework assignment or get a 100 on a quiz. (Right, Magistra?)
Made Me Memorize: The first ten lines of Vergil's The Aeneid, which I now can recall with clarion vividness when I am trying to remember things I need at the grocery store, or how to spell my own name.

I honestly don't know how it is that Magistra didn't see fit to taser me when I first was coming to know her. I was that nasty little chode who stayed all the time after class to talk about classical Roman/Greek things. I had ugly clothes and big hair, and if you've never met me, my teeth (to this day) rendered me the ability to eat an apple through a chain-link fence. But I was so lonely and desperate for attention, having just moved to Maine the summer before, and nobody in my classes gave me the time of day other than to make slashing motions over their throats at me when I did well on an exam or to extinguish Marlboros under my armpits. But Magistra... well, Magistra listened. If she was bored or weirded out by the kid whose only earthly obsession was the classical world, she made no indication of it. And, as time went on and I matured into my current incarnation, Magistra was there to talk to me and make me feel like I wasn't the Freak of the Week for loving Latin and the classical world. The taser always remained in her pocket, comforting her with its cool, steely presence, but she never used it, not even once.

When I was a freshman, attending the grand institution of Hackettstown High School (Motto: So Maybe You Won't Get Jumped in the Parking Lot), in my freshman Latin class, I became mildly obsessed with the idea of going to Greece. Ms. Fahey had a poster of the Athenian Acropolis on the wall above her desk, and when my mind wandered as we conjugated "puella" and "nauta" and "pirata", my gaze would inevitably be drawn to the magic on the wall. When Ms. Fahey announced that she was going to be taking a student trip to Greece, I laid cable in my pants. At the time, my $5 an hour, seven days a week, three hours a day job of massaging cream that smelled mildly like blowtorched human effluent into the bone-revealing bedsores of an anti-Semitic ninety-two year old woman and feeding her incontinent bitch of a dog seemed like the golden ticket to my Hellenic fantasies. Then, my mom dropped the bomb.

"Pack up your shit," she said. "I'm moving to Maine with or without you bitches." She was drunk, as usual, so I didn't take it at face value till the UHaul came. No trip for me. "Stop crying, or I will give you something to cry about, and we can't afford stitches", my mom said.

When I got to Maine, I marveled at the fact that Banguh High had a Latin program; furthermore, I found out that Magistra was going to be taking the same kind of trip. Now, Magistra, Italophile par excellence, was originally planning to go to Italy for the "grand tour", from Venice to Sicily. Insidiously, I planted an idea in her head: what if, uh, one was to go to Greece as well? Most likely fearing for her life, Magistra decided to do just that. The stage was set: now, the mechanical monkey had to make some money. To do so, I sold my soul to the Hooved One ($45), but that left me about $1,900 short. So I worked a miserable job for ten thousand years at the Holiday Inn on Odlin Road, Banguh, wherein I cleaned up human detritus, bleached unidentifiable stains from diseased carpets, and appeased dozens of (sometimes surly) room attendants with fresh linens and sundry items in un-airconditioned, three hundred degree hallways that were stale with exhaled smoke and the stench of human tears.

As spring approached, Magistra's eyes began to gleam unnaturally. She was going to get to go back to Italy. Mine gleamed, too, because I was high on glue. No, it was because my mild obsession with Athens had grown into a full-blown, paralyzing addiction. I had an entire wall of my bedroom wallpapered with pictures of Greece I'd photocopied or stolen wholesale from magazines. About a week before we left, our bodies were humming like tuning forks. It was then that I realized: hey, it's OK to love a place this much; if Magistra, who always had it together, was like that then I didn't have to be ashamed.

Italy was magnificent. The Colosseum lit up from the inside at night, the very thunder of the Roman traffic sounding like the roar of thousands of spectators and the howl of wild animals sequestered below... Pompeii, beyond the thousands of tourists, filled with unfurling spring poppies that stained the volcanic fields crimson... the view out over the Mediterranean from the summit of Anacapri... throwing some lira into Trevi Fountian over my shoulder like something out of La Dolce Vita... the cool crypts and soaring splendor of the Vatican...

But I had my eye on the prize, and Magistra knew it.

On the ferry from Brindisi, Magistra sat down next to me at the dinner table and ate with me. She was oddly quiet. About halfway through dinner, she said: "So, uh, we're going to be in Athens on Greek Easter." I knew this, but I hadn't given much thought to the ramifications of this news. Then it dawned on me: our tour of the Acropolis was to be on Sunday. Easter Sunday. Greek effing Easter Sunday, when all of the pagan sites in Greece are closed. I remember nearly choking and standing up and stammering. Magistra did her best to calm me and bade me sit. It was to be a long night, that one, and it would have been better for me if I didn't get worked up. I knew she was right, but to get that close and not realize my dream seemed to be the cruelest thing I'd ever been dealt.

That night, on a ferry filled with dozens of horny Greek sailors who'd been in the Greek navy for years, I sat on the deck of the ship and watched as we cut our way through Homer's wine-dark sea and cursed my fate. That, and I ate a bag of pretzels. One of the people from my group was talking to her friend nearby, and I heard her say that she'd done what she came to do when she bought a real cameo pin in Rome, and my white-hot loathing for her blinded me. On the tail of that, I began to scheme. I'd brought a tiny book about Athens with me on the trip, and when I looked up the hours of the Acropolis site, I saw that it opened at 8. Further investigation: we left for Boston at 2 PM Monday morning, and there was nothing planned for the day. Further still: our hotel was only a quarter mile from the Acropolis itself.

After I warded off the Greek sailor, I made up my mind then and there: All the boys DID think he was a spy; he DID have Bette Davis eyes. No, what I actually thought was, uh, that nothing but being disemboweled by rabid wombats would keep me away from the site come 7:45 AM Monday.

Needless to say, it happened. In the shade of the Parthenon, on the ovoid outcropping of my dreams looking down over a holiday-deserted Athens, I realized that I'd done what anyone who was as completely Athens-addled as I was would have done. No, don't clap for me. But the thing that made the entire experience the most memorable of my young life was how Magistra just smiled all day, warm inside from how blissed out *I* was. That's the kind of person she is. She was there to absorb the flow of tears from what could have been my young life's biggest disappointments, and she was there and happy for me when it all came through. It's hard being happy for someone, genuinely so, but she made it look easy.

Of all the people I've met in my short twenty-five years, Magistra's life is the one I look to when I think of how I want my own to be. No matter where she goes in the world, she's surrounded by friends. And, despite the costs, she's followed her dreams as far as they would go, doing what she knew would make her happiest. It's refreshing, really. Her life has static, like everyone else's. But in the end, all it takes is me imagining her walking down some medieval street in Italy, perhaps with a small bag of groceries under her arm, smiling, to make me feel warm, fuzzy, and hopeful.

Here's my shout out to Magistra: woman of conviction, of grace, of candor, and of strength we all would be lucky to possess. Semper ubi sub ubi. ;)

I remain, as ever,

Dom