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Wonderful Wallopers
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2018/10 - October
Everyone has a legendary teacher in his/her history. Mine was Mrs. Simpson. She taught Latin when Latin was still cool.
Should a student have the audacity to call Latin a dead language, she’d go all Vesuvial on their ashes. Mrs. Simpson was a force to be reckoned with, all 86 pounds of her.
As a sophomore, not yet a solo driver, I had to endure the humiliation of being taken to school by a doting, kissing, waving mother. Adding to my mortification, no matter how I timed it, we’d inevitably wind up behind Mrs. Simpson in her 1948 Plymouth tank. Three white hairs teetering atop her balding head and gnarly knuckles reaching up to steer the wheel were all we could see through her rear window. She thundered down miles of single-lane Summerlin Avenue traffic at a cheek-flapping 15 mph.
Later, in class Mrs. Simpson would tell us about the dreams she had of Julius Caesar when he’d gallop up on his white steed, Genitor, and whisk her away for a magnificent quest. She was never specific about what those quests involved, but the far-away look in her eye and the lascivious leer on her face … well, it was something my eyes and ears could never un-see, un-hear, though I’ve tried. Apollo knows I’ve tried.
Looking back, I ask myself what I gained from my Latin experience. For all the hours spent translating Caesar’s accounts of his victories in Gaul, this is what I remember:
O civile si ergo
Fortibus es in ero
O nobile deus trux
Votis inem causan dux
Homophonic translation:
“Oh, see, Willie. See her go. Forty busses in a row.”
“Oh, no, Willie, dey is trucks.”
“What is in ‘em?”
“Cows and ducks.”
The older I get, the more I reflect on the characters I’ve been lucky enough to bang into on this crazy planet. Not so much their ordinarities (sic), but their oddities and the walloping tales they told. For in the end, isn’t that all we take with us … our wild, wonderful, walloping tales of heroes and conquests and trysts and romances and a spinster Latin teacher galloping off into the sunset with the Emperor of Rome.
