QUID AGIS MANE!

    “Quid agis mane?”   (Loosely translated - "How ya doin.") our Latin teacher uttered every morning to start the class.  That phrase still makes me shutter...

     Latin, why in the world do we have to learn Latin? A “dead” language and especially deceased at 8:10 on Monday morning in that strange little MHS classroom with Dr. Ruth Munser.  A room so small there was no place to hide.  Latin 101, I had been at it for a week and at this point not sure if I could master it - even if I were to become a Roman Catholic! 

    
     She continued, (with that slight remnant of a German accent…I wondered why she didn’t teach that living language, instead of being stuck with a language nobody wanted to learn) – “Class please open to page 22 and…now this was a point of no return.  She was going to call on someone to stand and translate the first paragraph into our native tongue – Milvillian Anglo.  

Now Millvillian was a language that to the ear sounded like a South Carolinian twang mix with the drawn out diphthongs Philadelphia patois and it didn’t particularly lend itself to Latin.  But we tried.  And all of us feared having to translate in front of our peers of pain...trying not to think of the horrors of being called on first still makes me sweat and wishing to be invisible

     “Mr. Iszard”.  She always used our last names. “Will you translate the first paragraph”?  (How did she know I didn’t study over the weekend?  But she always knew who wasn’t prepared.)

 I blurted “I am sorry Dr. Munser, but I broke my glasses and won’t be able to read today.  Gads I don’t even wear glasses and I pulled a last resort excuse much too early in the year – this was a costly mistake I would learn later when it really counted.  “Oh, so sorry to hear that…Mr. Iszard.”  The she trumped my trump card.  But then let's do this - you won’t need your glasses to reiterate the point of the text - please conjugate the verb “cross - as in to cross the Rubicon" - for the class will you?  

     Nailed me again!

     And now I faced the consequences for not reading those few pages – a task in those days seemed akin to climbing Mt. Everest.  I stumbled through the task with just one whispered prompt on the last one from a gal pal next to me. 

     Dr. Ruth Munser, doctor of philosophy and tougher than any gladiator – never needed a sword to bring down the mighty and the pompous - just one cold stare.  “You may be seated" and I was dismissed as she called on Dave the Brain to read the paragraph.  (He would graduate Cum Laude and in later life write prescriptions for a living in Latin so his surgical patients would never know just what they were taking “once a day by mouth.") 

     Oh, how I wish that was all I had to worry about today wehn I can't sleep and conjugate the one verb I remember instead of sheep... when I whisper in my mind  - amō…amās… amat… amāmus… amatis… amant – and after repeating it several time the worry that woke me draft away into the darkness for now and I drift off ad sumnun.