Beyond Description: The Strangest Teacher I Ever Had
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: