Reunion

It was 45 years ago. My formal education had been over for nearly a year, and I was feeling nostalgic for some of the more interesting things I had started to learn as a teenager. One of those things was ancient Greek, which the Jesuit priests who ran the high school I'd attended were quick to recommend as a way to expand the mind. I had taken the bait.

So strong was their urging that I wound up studying Greek in their college, too, passing on other majors and sticking with Classical Lit, in the original. Oh, there were plenty of other disciplines to pick from. Business. Science. Computers, which in those days were called “data processing.” But those majors, the black-robed holy men assured me, were “for the dumb kids.” 

Especially computers. “You’ll never do anything creative with that. All they do all day is sit there at a typewriter punching holes in little cards. And there’s no money in it.” There were two computer languages back then, one called Fortran and another called Cobol. They were acronyms for something, I couldn’t tell you for sure what. But to heck with those languages. I plowed on with the Latin and Greek. Economics? Bah. Who needed it?

I didn’t have a lot of company. I think they graduated three or four others in the classics major along with me in 1975. Oh, everybody in the college was forced to read some of the classics in translation, not to mention the Bible of course, but only a few of us were pure enough for the originals.

Anyway, it was in reverie about all this that young lawyer me decided right out of law school that it might be fun to get back into the Greek. By that time, I hadn’t looked at it in around five years, and I was getting more than rusty. “I used to know a little Greek,” the joke went, “but he died.” So I started rounding up my old books from high school to dig in again.

Except that there was one missing. And it was the first one, the primer, a little hardbound volume of 400 pages or so called The Way to Greek. As sophomores in high school, a small group of us had spent the year working through that one with a cool young teacher named Tony Verdoni. Tony had brought the book, written by a Jesuit priest in New York named Steve Duffy, to life.

But now all I had of it was a memory. I was able to locate my student handbook on the Odyssey, and another book on the Anabasis, a plain-vanilla military journal that you read to get the basic hang of the language (“From there we marched six parasangs and killed some Persians”). But somewhere along the line, my first-year Greek grammar book had disappeared. It was like baseball cards and 45-rpm records, only more rare, a precious object lost in the mists.

I wasn’t ready to give up. I had friends in high places. At my request, one of my high school math teachers, who had become a good friend, actually raided the personal effects of one of the deceased fathers who had taught at the school and unearthed a copy of The Way to Greek, which my buddy mailed to me. Boy, was I surprised, and grateful. The guy whose copy he sent me was the priest who had written the brilliant Odyssey handbook. And as I knew from taking a religion class from him, that man had been a true mystic. When he talked to the Virgin Mary, I have no doubt that she talked back. His copy of that old grammar book was what they used to call a third-class relic.

Alas, before I even cracked it open, it slipped away, too. I had it in a suitcase on a Greyhound bus, and I foolishly checked the bag early. It was at the old bus depot at Fifth and Taylor in downtown Portland. Somebody swiped the bag with the book in it. That was the last I saw of The Way to Greek for four and a half decades.

I looked and looked. But there hadn’t been a lot of copies of the thing printed to begin with. It was used only at Jesuit high schools, and I believe only those on the East Coast, and let’s face it, a lot of the boys had long since wised up and were studying other things. I don’t know when the schools stopped teaching Greek altogether, but it couldn’t have been more than a decade or so after I had graduated.

At one point in the early 2000’s, I had internet contact with one of my high school Spanish teachers, who had risen to the rank of Provincial in the Jesuit order. (That’s right below the main Jesuit in the whole world, who’s called the general something or other. Above that, there’s only the Pope, although the Jesuits tended to laugh at whoever was wearing the papal beanie in Rome.) I asked the Provincial if he could find me a copy of The Way to Greek. He said he’d see if he could get in touch with the family of Father Duffy, the late author of the book, to see if they had one lying around. But nothing came of it.

Every once in a while, I’d run an internet search for it. You could see a couple of entries that acknowledged the book’s existence, but no evidence of where an actual copy could be found.

Until last week, when through the unsacred mysteries of Amazon, there it was. Sixty bucks. It arrived here yesterday from a bookseller in Texas. How it got there, I’ll never know.

It’s in great shape. It’s almost as if the student who owned it dropped out of the class after the first week. That kid has his name on the inside front cover. It was at a different Jesuit high school from mine, elsewhere on the East Coast. I looked him up. He was a few years behind me. He’s still alive. 

And get this: He’s a lawyer. A tax lawyer.

I think I’ll let him be. My sleuthing done, I’ll just enjoy the book. Plunge back into the aorist tense, the optative mood, the dual declensions, the middle voice! Rough breathings! It’s all still there, miraculously, just like the first day Tony Verdoni taught us. Sometimes this modern world has its blessings.