(*endnotes reference #s are in bold italics ex: 1, endnotes are located at the end of the piece.)

Dionysus was an animal.1 Or rather, “Dionysus was an animal,” she told us all, unable to purge her Missionary Baptist sentiment — and, God no, we aren’t Southern Baptists, she’d say. We’re Southern. And we’re Baptist. What sets us apart from those who use those words in succession is that we are right. And they, most likely, if you believe God’s prophecy even half a nickel’s worth, are going straight to what Dionysus would call Hades. But then again, he’s there too, sure as we stand here. “In Hades?” Jimmy Dixon would ask, always eager to have each of the freckles that lined the rim of his face and the cavities therein kissed by the soft look of a teacher who appreciates being made to feel like an expert. “Well, no,” she’d say, denying him the wet smile he desired because she interpreted Jimmy’s question as a threat rather than a bid for attention. “Not Hades. Dionysus and the great lot of Southern Baptists, along with a variety of other groups (or communities as they say now on television) are going to the fiery place the Bible talks about.” Jimmy Dixon steeled himself. Once more into the breach, he might very well have thought to himself as he trod undaunted back into the shrapnel-filled abyss of the No Man’s Land between teacher and young fourth-grade student: “Hell?” he asked, all the expectation of a hungry puppy dripping from his eyes and his mouth. “Well, yes, that’s one word for it,” she said, again withholding the affection Jimmy craved. “But it’s the bad word for it, and frankly you should know better than to use it in mixed company, Mr. Dixon.” He had taken a bullet, but he had yet to taste the soft, muddy ground, blood-soaked and forever salted with the avarice of simple men. “But my Uncle Chet said that every Southwest Conference football official was on his way to Hell on God’s very expressway. He said it fourteen times just last Saturday afternoon.” Her frown finally felled him. “Those words mean different things when you say them in the VFW, Mr. Dixon. Here at Orville and Alta Faubus Elementary, they are never appropriate. And they’re doubly inappropriate when your female classmates are present. Do I make myself perfectly clear?” She had.—from her otherwise heady lecture on pre-Christian Greek mythology. “But even in the dark days before Jesus felt the warm hay of the manger, the robed heathens of Greece realized this fact and generally relegated Dionysus to the status of crazy person.2 And they were all the better for it.” Imagine, she would say (in effect), the gall of someone who made a creed of enjoying life sans structure and discipline. Imagine not assuming infinity. This, she made clear, this tendency to find comfort and backbone in the very fact of temporariness, this desire to use that temporariness as a fulcrum for debauchery, was in all likelihood what brought Greece to its knees, the hapless victims of the Romans. “And yes,” she admitted without a hint of either irony or reluctance, “the Romans didn’t take too well to God’s chosen people at first. And yes, they were responsible for nailing the living embodiment of God himself to that cross, dually blessed and cursed, as it were. But without them, Jesus couldn’t very well have died for our sins, could he? And eventually they came around anyway.” The Romans could eat, drink, and be merry with the best of them, but they knew a good idea when they saw one. It was, in the end, this adaptability that gave them virtue. The stoic rigidity of her Missionary Baptism and her belief in the saving grace of adaptability never crossed swords in the classroom, but it was assumed by everyone that even bringing up this seeming inconsistency, much less charging her with a larger violation of hypocrisy or inexactitude would only lead us to the mortar shells, fear, and regret of No Man’s Land. We usually let it go.

Or rather, we adapted, took our cue from those simultaneously sainted and damned Romans— reputed killers of Jesus of Nazareth, sure, but also the creators (we soon learned in another lecture tinged with closed-leg bitterness and religious backbiting) of a menacing system of aqueducts “that would rival anything Little Rock could ever produce.” Waterpark owners all across America would tremble. It was that sort of engineering ingenuity that allowed a group of people so otherwise unworthy to murder the future judge and jury of every Southwest Conference football official and continue on unabated until they changed their minds and started believing he was God with a capital G. “And so it is,” she would tell us, a sated half-smile hiding all the childhood fears that still haunted her, even as she ascended the platform to give the glum pronouncements of history to her fourth-grade charges, “that the otherwise heathen contributed to the Western world. The Greeks did things to young boys that I would never speak about and that you won’t even get a glimpse of until the ill-advised and frankly immoral Human Anatomy and Reproduction course in ninth grade, mandated by a state legislature that no decent person ever approved of.3 The Romans made fornication a personal philosophy.4 But the Greeks had Plato, which started thinkers down a series of logical jumps that eventually got us to the checks and balances that make the American system work so well. And the Romans built an elaborate series of roads that became the model for Dwight Eisenhower’s beloved interstate highway system, without which making it to the beach during summer vacation would be darn-near impossible.” She saw a hand raised, wagging expectantly back and forth. Her eyebrows sunk, signaling to everyone but Jimmy that she had been on a roll and didn’t need her point clouded by questions that would only lead her astray. “Yes, Mr. Dixon.” “My Uncle Chet says that Dwight David Eisenhower and his interstate highway system can go fuck themselves because no one thought to connect Little Rock and Fayetteville when they were giving out roads.”5 There was not color in her face to begin with. She had the complexion and color constancy of a teardrop. But had she color to lose, it would have pooled at her feet on the makeshift dais from which she spoke. Her stare moved from Jimmy to the line of pseudo-factory windows behind us, just out of our reach, as if trying to conjure an answer to an otherwise inscrutable question. There were, to my mind, three possible interpretive tracks she could have taken as she stared blankly out those windows into the bright Arkansas morning:

1. Jimmy’s comment, and more specifically his claim that a war hero and two-time president of these United States would be better served engaging in the sort of self-pleasure (in whatever its form) better suited to the pre-Jesus heathens she had so meticulously described to us, was an individual attack on her and her Missionary Baptist sentiments.
2. Jimmy’s comment was a reflection of class feeling, a representative salvo aimed not from a lone gunman, but from a cabal of disgruntled fourth graders, perhaps the entire class, who had conspired to destroy her through the electroshock of inappropriate language. She couldn’t be sure of Jimmy’s church affiliation, but she knew there were a number of class members, including myself, whose parents dragged them to either the Starlight Baptist, 4th Street Baptist, or John the Baptist Baptist churches (all affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention).6
3. Jimmy’s comment was as sincere as most fourth grade questions, and the real guilty party was Uncle Chet, whose VFW mouth had intruded on the moral center of Faubus Elementary yet again.

The only reasonable choice among the three, I see now (and, hindsight being what it is, I assume I also saw then, though memory can be bedeviling in situations such as this, when you want so much not only to be right, but to have been right, as well. What’s the old joke? I used to think the mind was utterly captivating until I realized my mind was the one trying to convince me? Yes, indeed. Something like that.), was number 3). The only reasonable deduction one could make from the progression from lone gunman to cabal to happy accident—even, I think, for a victim who has just spent forty-five minutes parsing out surprisingly tawdry details of the betrayal and murder of Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius receiving far better treatment than Judas because 1) they had a sense of whimsy, and 2) “Caesar had it coming. People cross the Rubicon every day, and you don’t see them developing a God-complex, now do you?”—was happy accident. Whatever the arguments for and against Brutus, Cassius, and Judas, certainly one point of agreement for academics everywhere is that neither of the three were in the fourth grade when their variously-interpreted dastardly and/or heroic acts were committed.7 But, as I remember it now, even as I knew that Jimmy’s comment was sincere (there was, I suppose, the possibility that his earlier lack of success at coaxing approval from the reticent eyes of his teacher had given him motive for a possible counterattack, but as most interpretations of Brutus and Cassius note, and as most interpretations of Judas frustratingly ignore, pulling off a coup takes brains, a foresight usually not attributed to fourth-grade minds), I also knew that she wouldn’t see it that way. As the bright Arkansas morning stared back at her through those faux-factory windows, she had had just about enough of Uncle Chet, the Devil, and John the Baptist Baptist encroaching on her history lectures.

“First of all, Mr. Dixon,” she said not to Jimmy, but to the sunshine creeping in through the windows, “I don’t think Dwight David Eisenhower gave a tinker’s damn about your bootlegger family arriving on time for Razorback kickoff. And I don’t think it was ever official government policy to give drunk drivers a straighter path home after another inevitable loss to the by-God Texas Longhorns. Go home and tell your Uncle Chet that he hasn’t served in a foreign war, so he has no patriotic mandate to carry on like a foul-mouthed sod. I could put my God up against his God any day, and sure as I’m standing here the end result would be the fiery disappearance of his beloved VFW. I could…” Or rather, it sounded more like, “I cou…” She was still staring into the outside sky, but her visage had receded down the chalkboard seven or eight inches. Her knees continued to bend with every corroded sentence, as if she were corroding with them, eventually to end in a pool of rust on the platform. It was right around “foreign war” that I saw the first tear come from seeming nowhere to shock us all into the existentially horrifying realization that our teacher leaked. That she was fallible. That when she skinned her metaphorical elbow, she had the same reaction as when we skinned our real ones. We had been yelled at before, and though her discourse would scar many of us for many years to come (see Appendix A, “Exegesis of Fourth-Grade Teacher’s Ophelia-Like Breakdown and Analysis Of It’s Potential to Wreak Havoc On Impressionable Fourth-Grade Minds”), it was those first tears that made the event so life-alteringly transformative, as we sat in stunned silence. (Those first tears also served as a sort of punctuation to her “Texas Longhorns” comment. As is cataloged in Appendix A, no segment of her inappropriate denouement was as offensive as her ridiculous elevation of a university football team we had all learned since birth was the functional equivalent of the politburo. And lo these many years later, if nothing of the above or below proves valuable information to those so inclined to seek it, know this: Texas Sucks. See Appendix B, “Picture of an Upside-Down Longhorn.”) It was the tense silence of dental waiting rooms and inevitable breakups, where the whir of the air conditioner, the orioles outside, and that mysterious clop, clop, clop in the hallway became ever-present, became class members, new students from far away places who sat next to each of us and awkwardly asked us our names. And then there was a tiny squeak. Then another. I turned to see Jimmy slowly sliding down the curve and slope of his desk, eager to meet the patient floor below. His eyes were closed, and I knew (I assumed) he had passed out. Nicole Brewster, who sat next to me and who I desperately wanted to make my girlfriend, even though I wasn’t particularly sure what either the word “girlfriend” or the desire to have one actually meant, noticed it, too. Turning back toward the front, we noticed that our teacher’s place on the chalkboard was between two and three inches lower than it had been at the onset of Stunned Silence. And then we noticed each other. We were the median between these two fading poles, and if our own self-conception and internal definitions were based on the fundamental fact of their existence, we were likely to be washed away in the flood.8 We were the Golden Mean.9 (see below). And we were disappearing.

As she sunk, our teacher’s hair began erasing the garbled series of Xs, Vs, and Is that she had scrawled across the board in an effort to demonstrate the clumsy but clear number system of the greatest aqueduct builders in what for all she knew was the entire universe. She slunk between a five and dime, as it were, the semi-shocked expression on her face forming a perfect O. And there, for my entire fourth-grade class to see, was the Latin “voice” trumping any she could have made as she continued her slide in silence.10 Of course, we didn’t know Latin and the more pressing matter of a just-lapsed Missionary Baptist steadily moving towards the floor had consumed our immediate attention. Our teacher had proven fragile, and the consequences for our own hopes for futures bright and vaguely adult began sliding with her and Jimmy toward an inevitable collapse on the grey-speckled tiles below. This had the dual effect of mimicking a punch in the stomach and simultaneously bringing the fact of our childhood into stark relief. We were, existentially if not ontologically, alone. And we were going to need some sort of assistance in negotiating with the adult quickly fading in front of us.

I looked desperately to the speaker mounted just to the left of the classroom door, praying to a God I knew my teacher would not approve of that the voices of the principal or the principal’s secretary would crackle to life from that magic box and assure us that help was on the way. “No need to worry, children,” the secretary would say, because no matter how many semesters we traversed the halls of O&A Faubus, she would always address students in need of first aid or a ride home as “dear child.” In groups, they were “children.” Just once I wanted to explain that “children” were not allowed to go without a babysitter when their mothers had a date with the refrigerator repairman who smelled like mustard, as I had been allowed to do for more than three full months. “Help is on the way! We’ve been monitoring the battle of wills and wits in your classroom, and we have ambulances handy to remove both of the combatants from the arena. No harm will come to you. You are not alone, despite those fears you still harbor every time your mother leaves the house with the refrigerator repairman who smells like mustard. These people will be fine, and you will be fine, as well.” But neither the principal nor the principal’s secretary appeared, disembodied, in the box just to the left of the classroom door. I was paralyzed by my fear. Or rather, by my apprehension that this was a situation that life had yet to equip me for. This was not the case for Nicole.

As our teacher moved below the V and X on the chalkboard, Nicole stood and rushed to the door, just to the right of the speaker, and then she opened it and left. She was stentorian as she left, beautiful in the time lapse her maturity experienced as she moved from her seat to the head of the class. I saw her (and would assume that the full panoply of classroom attendants also saw her) as vaulted by her certitude to grades far beyond the cope of Orville and Alta.11 She was a seventh-grade goddess quickly leaving the fourth grade behind, and as my gaze moved from the speaker to the object of my infatuation rushing determinedly through the door, Dionysus, Jimmy and Dwight David Eisenhower moved far beyond the reach of my conscious thought. Until the thud of Jimmy’s head hitting the tiled floor.

I turned to look at him, still weighted by the apprehension that had kept me fixed to my seat while Nicole, the lovely Nicole, matured right before me. The first thing I noticed was that Jimmy’s proximity to the floor did not prevent his head from bouncing violently off the tiles. Though any passed out fourth-grade boy would have maintained his approximate position on the floor (see below), there normally, in a typical falling-out-of-desk situation, would not have been a small puddle of blood pooling around that passed out fourth-grade boy’s head.

I again wanted to take charge, wanted to be Dwight David Eisenhower, leading the troops of my fourth-grade class into battle, but I was Douglas MacArthured by the otherwise unremarkable Theodore Silva, who squinted in a determined, pre-hubris-and-mistakes-of-the-Korean-conflict way.12 “Jimmy hit his head,” he announced to the class. “He’s bleeding!” He rushed to Jimmy’s desk and leaned over him, painfully aware (as were we all) that he was unequipped to help the victim, but still willing to stare at him with empathetic anguish just as myriad television programs had taught him. As he stared at Jimmy, I turned back to the head of the class and thought I saw a glimmer of recognition in our teacher’s face as her vacuous eyes reached the floor where her inquisitor lay prostrate and bleeding. Her expression didn’t betray a regret that “one of my pupils is unsafe,” but rather a frustration that “lectures on Greco-Roman culture are not supposed to culminate in this.” She continued her slow slide down the chalkboard.

The clop, clop, clop of heavy feet moving swiftly was perversely audible from the quiet shock and gloom of our class, and as they thundered toward us, I thought about the Dionysus story, the one our teacher used to demonstrate his animal nature and to justify her disapproval (and, no, this is not vain retro-attribution, I am not mapping on later thoughts to a crystalline subsection of historical time. The story became so vivid in that moment, when fear seems to pulse in from the outside, and thus your inner thoughts become correspondingly baroque in an effort to make your mind forget all that’s going on around it. It was almost as if I was replaying her lecture, seeing words like “useless death” and “the perils of ego,” appear on the chalkboard again, still fraught with all the angst that they were originally intended to convey.). Dionysus had a large following in Thebes because it was the place of his birth, a phenomenon that works for gods much as it does for politicians, athletes, and movie stars. Women in Thebes were in fact so crazy for Dionysus that they would take to the forest, engage in all sorts of orgiastic debauchery, under the guise of worship, and generally scandalize all of those in town not under the specific spell of the wine god. Even the most lapsed of Missionary Baptists would weep. Southern Baptists, too, though you couldn’t make my fourth-grade teacher believe it. These women, Maenads as they were called (“‘Maenad’ is not the Greek word for ‘whore,’” she told us, “but it might as well be. Contemporary maenads live in Las Vegas, throwing their panties at Wayne Newton and ignoring the Bible.”), even included, according to one version of the story, the mother of the very king (“The Virgin Mary she wasn’t.”).13 King Pentheus was Dionysus’s cousin, but family loyalty flies out the faux-factory windows when the women of the kingdom turn their worship toward another. “I am the median between these two fading poles,” he may have said, looking from side to side at his cousin and his enraptured mother, “and if my own self-conception and internal definition is based on the fundamental fact of their existence, I am likely to be washed away in the flood. I am the Golden Mean (see below). And I am disappearing.”

Dionysus sensed the threat, and lured Pentheus to the forest where Maenads large and small executed him for what for all practical intents and purposes was Garden Variety Jealousy. Among the murders was Agave, his mother, “who had sold her soul for rock-and-roll, to use the parlance of our times.”14 Pentheus was inactive. He was jealous. And the Greek god of ecstasy and intoxication killed him. Woe be to those, to use the parlance of other times.

The secretary violently opened our classroom door. “No need to worry children,” she said. “Help is on the way!” Help was, in fact, there. As she moved into the room, she revealed Principal Salters behind her, along with two sixth-grade teachers who I had seen before but avoided, because sixth-grade teachers were representatives of the sixth grade, and therefore mature and intimidating. Their presence in the hallway made me, a fourth grader, feel smaller, and now they were in my classroom. All three of the secretary’s companions were men (“The better to carry out those in need, children,” the secretary would later explain.) and they immediately took to the task of carting out the victims of the question-and-answer session with all the gusto of Greco-Roman heroes. The two sixth-grade teachers grabbed their colleague, one by the shoulders, one by the ankles, just before her limp body reached the floor. Principal Salters moved quickly to Jimmy, but paused as he arrived, placing his hand on Theodore’s shoulder as if to convey unity. “We are in this together,” the gesture seemed to say. “We are men among boys.” That gesture alone filled me with the all the frustration of Pentheus, but his actual comments only deepened the wound. “How’s he doing, there, son?” Theodore frowned knowingly. “Well, he’s bleeding here from the head, Mr. Salters, because he gave it a good knock on the floor. I think he might need some stitches.” Principal Salters leaned in and picked up the prostrate Jimmy, and in mid-crouch, though never looking Theodore in the eye, he said, very distinctly, so that the entire class could hear him, “Good work, Mr. Silva.” And with one swoop, one elegant motion born of ballet and grace, he was gone. And Jimmy was gone. And Theodore stood slowly while Maggie Golding practically cooed. Then it was Maggie Henry (known to classmates and teachers alike as Maggie-H, because Maggie Golding had been at Faubus a year longer, and thus had earned the right to answer to her first name, sans additional modifier). Then Amy Carricker, then Elizabeth (don’t call me Liz) Holland. The fourth-grade girls of Orville and Alta Faubus Elementary discovered boys that day, and their discovery led them immediately from distaste to all-consuming passion for the otherwise unremarkable Theodore Silva. They were Maenads at his beck and call.

Then there was Agave, my mother, Nicole entering from just under and to the right of the speaker. I cannot say for certain whether one of the sixth-grade teachers or Principal Salters spoke to her about Theodore’s bravery and certitude, but when she entered the room she knew, and I knew she knew, and I sat there helpless, knowing that those in my kingdom no longer paid their reverence to me. She walked back to her seat, but before she sat, she rubbed her hips slowly, continually, repetitively. She bit her lip, engrossed in framing her sentence just as she wanted to. “Theodore, come sit down here,” she said. “You did a good thing. Relax.” He looked at her, saw the same radiance we all saw as she rocketed out of the room, and smiled a confident smile. (And where, I thought, did he find the gumption to smile like that? He didn’t do anything, I wanted to tell her. He knelt. He was just as helpless as I was, as we all were, he just placed his helplessness in closer proximity to the victim. He was neither god, nor king, nor mother.) He stood and walked over to her, sitting in her desk as she patted his head, both of them allowing the experience to make them far older than they were. They had not passed the fourth grade, they had transcended it, and those left in their wake closed in around them. The massing presence around my desk and Nicole’s drove me from my seat, as I moved, stepping carefully backward, toward the student artwork hung on the classroom’s sidewall. It may as well have been the forest, and though the otherwise unremarkable Theodore Silva didn’t know he had done it, his gesture put me there (see below).

I was inactive. I was jealous. And the Greek god of ecstasy and intoxication killed me. I felt carried out to the forest, and murdered by my mother.

_________________________________________

APPENDIX A

Exegesis of Fourth-Grade Teacher’s Ophelia-Like Breakdown and Analysis Of Its Potential to Wreak Havoc On Impressionable Fourth-Grade Minds

The Text

First of all, Mr. Dixon, I don’t think Dwight David Eisenhower gave a tinker’s damn about your bootlegger family arriving on time for Razorback kickoff. And I don’t think it was ever official government policy to give drunk drivers a straighter path home after another inevitable loss to the by-God Texas Longhorns. Go home and tell your Uncle Chet that he hasn’t served in a foreign war, so he has no patriotic mandate to carry on like a foul-mouthed sod. I could put my God up against his God any day, and sure as I’m standing here the end result would be the fiery disappearance of his beloved VFW. I could.

Commentary

As mentioned in the body of the tale above, our fourth-grade teacher’s elevation of “the by-God Texas Longhorns” (italics mine) was by far the most offensive and surprising feature of her farewell address, akin to Jeremiah wagging his finger in the faces of his congregants, taunting them that their buildings would never be as high as those of Babel. But the offense hid the most salient aspect of her first two sentences: she was correct. Dwight Eisenhower didn’t care about Razorback kickoffs and Jimmy’s family was (or had been) in the liquor business, legal or not, depending on the county and/or decade of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the interstate highway that has since been installed has carried more than its fair share of drunk football fanatics—whether in the throes of celebratory joy or slings bitter ignominy—back to the central part of the state. In her third sentence, however, she begins to lose her authoritative voice, as she combines an attack on Uncle Chet’s patriotism with the epithet “foul-mouthed sod,” a decidedly British term. The credibility gap created by the oversight only exacerbates the sin of her concluding sentence, as she enters into the angels-fear-to-tread arena of blasphemy. I am no scholar of Missionary Baptist theology, but entering your God in a pissing contest with someone else’s seems to be a Bible-Only Phenomenon, akin to talking fiery bushes, fermenting water at wedding receptions, and raising people from the dead. When coupled with her “tinker’s damn” comment, she had not only shocked herself out of consciousness (I contend that her near-catatonic state resulted from her surprise at the depth of her potential depravity.), but ruined her ability to chide the Greeks as hell-bound monsters. We had not only felt her wrath, but she had pulled the rug from beneath her own authority.15 Thus we were left with The Void.

APPENDIX B

Picture of an Upside-Down Longhorn

APPENDIX C

Brief Postscript

The following day, we entered the class with caution, only to find a substitute waiting for us. My furtive glances toward Nicole were rebuffed as they were before, but this time the slights carried the extra sting of representing the heart of another.16 The substitute remained for the rest of the week, as did Jimmy’s absence from class. The following week, another teacher appeared, assuring us that she would be “the teacher of record for the rest of the semester.” And Jimmy came back, too. His eagerness to question his teachers as a means of winning their approval was tempered at first, but returned within the month. Though we never saw our teacher again (to the great relief of our Southern Baptist mothers, each of whom received full reports of our possible damnation when we returned home from school that afternoon), I would assume that Uncle Chet and the boys down at the VFW would have noted that her absence was unfortunate but understandable. “That is what you get,” they might have said, “for conflating the prowess of that gaggle of criminals, miscreants, and cheaters known to the broader world as the Texas Longhorns. God love the Arkansas Razorbacks. Texas can go to Hell.”

Forgive me, our Missionary Baptist martyr, wherever you may be. I have never served in a foreign war, but Texas can go to Hell.

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ENDNOTES

1 That’s Dionysus: Greek god of wine and agriculture, as well as more rock-and-roll states, such as ecstasy, intoxication, and initiation into clubs that would make your mother frown. He was, however, like Jesus Christ and every Missionary Baptist that eventually came after him, reborn in his father’s image. One version of the story has him as the would-be son of Zeus and the mortal Semele. But Zeus, like many workaholic husbands, killed her with lightning bolts, forcing him to use his own thigh as a makeshift womb for young Dionysus. Another version has his mother as Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. In this tale, Dionysus is born, but ripped apart as an infant, leaving only his heart. Zeus salvages the heart, remakes the embryo, then places it in the vacant womb of Semele, who redelivers him. Voila! Rebirth. See Rachel Gross and Dale Grote, “Dionysus,” in Encyclopedia Mythica.

2 It may have been the two births. It may have been the ecstasy. But my fourth-grade teacher was essentially spot-on in this otherwise bizarre digression. Homer barely mentions Dionysus, and when he does, the god is always angry and vengeful. Euripides didn’t portray him with any more kindness. The Bacchae could have been subtitled “Reasons Why It’s Silly (and Bordering on Self-Destructive) to Worship This Misogynist. “ See Homer, The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Homer, The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richard Lattimore (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999); and Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott (New York: Penguin Classics, 1954).

3 For Greek boy-love, see Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1990). For the storied history of Arkansas legislators and their relationship with sex acts large and small, see Arkansas Law on Disc (Charlottesville, VA: Lexis Law Publishing, annual). Interpretation can be found most readily in the Arkansas Law Review (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas School of Law, annual).

4 See John Clarke, Roman Sex: 100 B.C. to 250 A.D. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003).

5 Finally, long after the death of Dwight David Eisenhower (and, unfortunately, long after my time in fourth grade and the sad passing of Jimmy’s Uncle Chet) construction crews spent most of the 1990s building the very Interstate Uncle Chet was craving. The reason he wanted it, of course, was the same reason everyone in Arkansas wanted it: so people in Little Rock and its surrounds could travel to Fayetteville to watch the Razorbacks play football and to damn all Southwest Conference football officials to various versions of hell. When the freeway was completed, however, the Razorbacks no longer played in the Southwest Conference. Football fanatics driving the glistening, federally funded roads found themselves in transit to damning Southeastern Conference football officials to various versions of hell. Still, in quieter moments, I like to think that Chet, Dwight, and Jimmy are in their respective homes, cosmic or not, and smiling. See the online Interstate Guide.

6 See William Wright Barnes, The Southern Baptist Convention, 1845-1953 (New York: Broadman Press, 1954). Or, for a more jaded view that would probably represent the thoughts of most of my fourth-grade classmates once their tiny eyes grew large and away from the eyes that watched them for their first, formative years, see E. Luther Copeland, The Southern Baptist Convention and the Judgment of History: The Taint of Original Sin (New York: University Press of America, 2002). My parents, for the record, dragged me to Starlight.

7 The literature here is vast, but for a surprisingly illuminating introduction, see John Updike, A Month of Sundays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 89-90.

8 See Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (New York: Rodale Books, 2006). There’s also a movie, if you’re inclined to take that route. (Paramount, 2006)

9 That’s phi = 1/2(1+sqrt(5)) = 1.618033988749894848204586834365638117720… This all comes, in its original form, from Leonardo of Pisa, otherwise known as Fibonacci. His number serieses still make mathematicians ga-ga. See Frances and Joseph Gies, Leonard of Pisa and the New Mathematics of the Middle Ages (New York: New Classics Library, 1983); R.A. Dunlap, The Golden Ratio and Irrational Numbers (New York: World Scientific Publishing Company, 1998); and Robert Herz-Fischler, A Mathematical History of the Golden Number (New York: Dover, 1998). Or, for a more condensed analysis, click here.

10 And, to this day, I maintain that she would have been thrilled rather than disgusted by the image. It was, after all, Latin (not Greek). That’s VOICE, with a linguistic declension ending in VOX, but traveling through a veritable cornucopia of different forms depending on country and year of use. See Oxford English Dictionary Online (London: Oxford University Press, 2007.) VOX comes to the English-speaking world in its most common form, vox populi, meaning 1) the general idea that everyone would express were they in the business of expressing such things, or 2) the anti-Jimmy; what the rest of my fourth-grade classmates were thinking as “Mr. Dixon” regaled the room with another piece of VFW wisdom. (And VOX, like hair loss, heart disease, and my ability to recount the details of this event on paper, as I had always promised myself I would, skipped a generation. Or rather it skipped a number of generations. In one of those linguistic ticks that make language worth speaking, it turns out that after the fall of the Romans, it took the English-speaking world until the fifteenth century before picking up VOX yet again—that’s vox populi vox Dei, “the voice of the people is the voice of God,” and I can only imagine the hostile response a dyed-in-the-wool Missionary Baptist would have to that piece of Old English wisdom, particularly in light of the crushing inferiority complex that came with being so low on the Baptist Food Chain. The poor girl would have seen rubber walls, would have heard a vox angelica playing in the heavens above her, and she would have felt tortured by that, as well. See Oxford English Dictionary Online (London: Oxford University Press, 2007.)

11 This, I think (or have thought, in these many years since the incident) is somewhat akin to the popular explanation of Einstein’s description of the relationship between space and time. Were two people of the same age to separate, one staying on the couch watching reruns of Hill Street Blues or, say, highlight videos of Arkansas Razorback football seasons past, and the other chose instead to rocket through space at light speed, the astronaut of the two would come back younger, thinner, and invariably better for the experience, while the football fan would have put on twenty pounds, rifled through at least one failed relationship, with or without marriage certificate, and entered what many in the psychoanalytic profession refer to as “clinical, bone-crushing depression.” These are the vagaries of physics, for better or worse. See Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1920; reprint; Pittsburgh: Three Rivers Press, 1995).

12 As we learned in every classroom at Orville and Alta Faubus, Douglas MacArthur was an Arkansas native. His well-worn shame about this fact did not prohibit Little Rock from erecting a memorial statue in the lush landscaping of MacArthur Park. For MacArthur hagiography, see William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964 (New York: Dell, 1983). (And perhaps that “hagiography” comment isn’t so fair, because Manchester does give MacArthur some raps on the knuckles for his Lamarckian self-love and hubris.) For the catastrophic effects of overreaching your bounds, particularly in Asian land wars, see Max Hastings, The Korean War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).

13 Here she was cribbing Euripides. For citation, see note 2.

14 The latter is of course a quote from my fourth-grade teacher, pre-fallfromgrace. What I find most interesting about the tale and its teller, however, is not the incestuous brew of jealousy and revenge. It isn’t the blood, and it isn’t the incessant pull of my own mother issues. Rather, I find it interesting that a woman so concerned that we would be turned by the very orgiastic debauchery that the Maenads enjoyed in the suburban forests of Thebes would choose to demonstrate Dionysian animality with a murder story instead of a drunken revelry story. I have no compelling answers to provide here. The limit of my thinking on the matter has taken me to assume that her guttural fear of the siren song of drink and drug led her to believe that any such tale, however gruesomely told, would be far more temptation than warning.

15 That is to say nothing of her direct assault on the family of a student. The truth of her comments about Jimmy Dixon’s family seem socially beside the point, as she attempted to traverse the delicate balance between teacher and pupil. In power relationships such as those, tact seems far more important than truth. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972).

16 When girls did not care about boys, their inattention was an amusing distraction. When they cared about another boy, the distraction was far more problematic. See Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. John Rutherford (1605; reprint; New York: Penguin Classics, 2003).