May 4, 2024
I know what you’re thinking. You’re looking at this picture and thinking . . . poor Cathy, alone in Rome. How’s she going to get the man home. He’s clearly had a stroke.
I can explain. Honest. There’s a theme here. But it needs just a little time to percolate.
If you look at this picture, you’ll see three photographs taken in .. . that “MARVELOUS YEAR” . . . .1968. (I know . . . Martin, Bobby, Tet, Chicago convention . . .the word “marvelous” might have been a poor word choice.)
Anyway, on the left, you’ll see my wife “Cathy Perry performing at [the] Christmas assembly.” I can’t recall the role exactly, but she clearly nailed it. The reviews all agreed. Out of the park.
On the other hand, on the bottom of the page, you’ll see six boys doing what appears to be the CanCan. The crack editor of the RVJH Skyhawk, our junior high yearbook, described them as a “Rincon Chorus Line.” The reviews on their performance were . . . let’s say . . . mixed.
Now, history being one of the themes struggling to emerge from this post, I have to take issue with the caption. We were at Rincon Valley Junior High. That much is true. But, we were making fun of our rival Slater Junior High. I know this because that’s me. The doofus in the middle with an “S” . . . that’s “S” for Slater . . . coming unpinned from his sweatshirt who, in his enthusiasm, appears to have lost his scarf and looks like . . . well . . . a boy in a skirt.
I was conflicted. Okay?
Anyway, it isn’t those photographs I want you to focus on. It’s the one in the middle. See the teacher serving a volleyball? That’s Coral Barberini. Cathy and I had her for fifth period English and sixth period Literature. And it was in that Literature class where we first learned of Greek and Roman mythology.
Stories like Daedalus and Icarus, Apollo and Daphne, Narcissus and Echo, and Leda and the Swan. We ate that stuff up.
Thank you, Coral.
In 1965, three years before The Chorus Line bombed, when Cathy was a nine-year-old in Mr. Austin’s 4th grade class at what was then known as Rincon Valley Grade School, she did a report on the Pantheon in Rome. That’s it. The building behind her.
As we walked inside today, she recalled excerpts from her report. I kid you not. (Get it? “I kid you not”? Sometimes I crack myself up.) Almost sixty years, and she remembers that report like it was yesterday.
As Cathy explained in her 4th Grade report, the Pantheon in its “current” form, is believed to have been built in 126 AD by the Emperor Hadrian on the site of a previous temple destroyed by fire during the reign of the first Emperor Augustus. (This always makes me wonder . . . just how does a stone structure burn down? I mean . . .?)
Almost two thousand years old, the “new” Pantheon is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.
If you look in this photograph, you’ll see the oculus. The opening in the gray dome? No, not my gray dome. Look higher, smart ass.
Fun fact? The height of the oculus and the diameter of the room are the same, 142 feet. The oculus , 27 feet in diameter, is the only source of natural light. Because the door faces due north, the light cast by the oculus works as a sundial. The Roman senators who were included in Cathy’s report would know the time by looking at the wall.
It was 11:30 when we were there.
Another fun fact? The columns on the front of the Pantheon were made from marble quarried in the eastern mountains of Egypt. They are 39 feet tall, five feet in diameter and each weigh 60 tons. They were dragged sixty miles on wood sledges, loaded onto barges on the Nile, floated down the Nile when the Spring water was high, resting on bags filled with lentils (the original bean bags), loaded on ships to cross the Mediterranean, then put back on barges pulled by oxen up stream on the Tiber, then schlepped by slaves 700 meters.
Then?
Then they laid in the grass for over two hundred years. Yep. Just laid there. For over three times the span of time that separates Cathy from her 4th grade report. Until one day someone thought, “Hey, why don’t we use those old gray columns lying in the grass over there in the new improved Pantheon?”
Genius, Hector. We’ll save a few denarii. (Kind of an ancient Habitat for Humanity ReStore.)
Thank you, Mr. Austin.
Those of you who know Cathy know she loves archeology. She would have been very happy to tie on a Tilly Hat, shorts, a t shirt and boots and brush away sentiment in some excavation to reveal ancient artifacts. (Okay, maybe not the Tilley Hat) She loved staring up at the light that passed to the interior of the neolithic mound at Newgrange in Ireland. She loved traipsing through the Colosseum and down the Via Sacra through the Roman Forum today. She is looking forward to Pompeii before we head home.
Think of the time.
Newgrange was 3200 years before the Forum and the Colosseum. The Pantheon was almost 2000 years before Cathy’s report in Mr. Austin’s class. The sixty years since her report, as long as they may seem, are a blink of an eye in this Circus Maximus we call humans.
Thank you Mr. Austin. Thank you Mrs. Barberini. Thank you to all of you teachers out there. You know who you are. And we know who you were.
This world . . . our world . . . this time . . . our time . . . is so much richer because you told us stories, asked us to do reports, and blessed us with curiosity to last a lifetime.
As long as it may seem and short as it might be.
"Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost" 