(no subject)
When I was a young boy I had a school teacher named Mr. Popadopoulos. Mr. Popadopoulos was a short but extremely amiable man, with curly black hair, scholarly glasses, and a gait that bespoke confidence in all undertakings, despite the deficient brevity of his legs. He was a man with a remarkable presence. I recall in particular the effect which he had on the older female members of my school. They would giggle softly in the back of the class, pass notes, and be overcome with gauzy far-away looks. Their fantasies were often nurtured and stoked with the flames of a possessive passion, every girl steadfastly believing that she alone held the key to his heart and would one day be the future Mrs. Popadopoulos. The boys, for their part, were in thrall to his easy command of adventure and his knowledge of the world (not to mention the sway which he held over the female, which I know believe to have extended to even the women of the school, in particular a Mrs. Ruskin, the mousy art teacher who liked to barge in on his Manifest Destiny lecture and pretend to be short of chalk). His life outside of school was oft-discussed amongst the boys, and there were many things hypothesized during recess and on the soccer team which now sound absurd but were not so unfeasible at the time. A particularly lingering rumor was that Popadopoulous was a spy who could speak twenty languages and was here to gather information about our principal, Mr. Herrlicht, who was clearly a Nazi in hiding. As I happened to get to know the man latter in life, I can relate to that the above was not true. Mr. Popadopoulos did have a secret, however. Mr. Popadopoulos had a passion for the romantic art of hot-air ballooning.
I believe Mr. Popadopolous to have enjoyed the hot air balloon for its Gallic winsomeness. This would have to have been coupled, of course, with all of the ridiculous aristocratic associations that ballooning would conjure up for him, as if one moment he could be eating hors d'ouevres and drinking champagne with a lady friend and the next soaring away in a whoosh of Montgolfier gallavantry. Professor Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, the noted Civil War ballooning hero, was particularly inspirational. Mr. Popadopolous admired men whose spirits had melded Scholar, Adventurer, and Warrior.
One day Mr. Popadopolous walked into the classroom without his usual convivial air. He seemed thoughtful and reserved. This unnerved us greatly. He then told us a story which we took to be a fanciful and baroque augmentation of some Greek fairy tale, a tale with a confusing and open structure and very little in the way of moral stricture. We left class with clawing uneasiness and unsettled brains, but for most of us this was washed away the next day when his usual demeanor returned. We later ascribed his contemplative mood to mere dramatic effect, but based upon my conversations with him later in life and a bit of sleuthing done on my own, I believe that a large portion of this story is true. What can be ascribed to allegory and what represents a semblance of reality I will leave it to the reader to parse out. I here record his story, "The Five Hens":
to be continued...
I believe Mr. Popadopolous to have enjoyed the hot air balloon for its Gallic winsomeness. This would have to have been coupled, of course, with all of the ridiculous aristocratic associations that ballooning would conjure up for him, as if one moment he could be eating hors d'ouevres and drinking champagne with a lady friend and the next soaring away in a whoosh of Montgolfier gallavantry. Professor Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, the noted Civil War ballooning hero, was particularly inspirational. Mr. Popadopolous admired men whose spirits had melded Scholar, Adventurer, and Warrior.
One day Mr. Popadopolous walked into the classroom without his usual convivial air. He seemed thoughtful and reserved. This unnerved us greatly. He then told us a story which we took to be a fanciful and baroque augmentation of some Greek fairy tale, a tale with a confusing and open structure and very little in the way of moral stricture. We left class with clawing uneasiness and unsettled brains, but for most of us this was washed away the next day when his usual demeanor returned. We later ascribed his contemplative mood to mere dramatic effect, but based upon my conversations with him later in life and a bit of sleuthing done on my own, I believe that a large portion of this story is true. What can be ascribed to allegory and what represents a semblance of reality I will leave it to the reader to parse out. I here record his story, "The Five Hens":
to be continued...