Potpourri, June 18 (2020 edition)

[The latest installment in my not-quite-annual series of whatever-the-hell-I-want posts on this month and day.]

Like probably 90% of the (rational) US population, The Missus and I have recently spent most of our free time together watching television. Among our guilty pleasures: the complete run of the old Perry Mason series, with Raymond Burr in the title role. I may write more about this later, but for now I wanted to mention that the theme song — all those classic late-1950s dramatic, jazz-infused horns — heavily reminded me of some other show’s theme song… but I couldn’t remember which other show that was.

Well, as things happened, I didn’t have to wonder about that for long. While scrolling through Amazon Prime’s back catalog, I came across the entire run of the Peter Gunn show. That series lasted only three seasons, vs. Mason’s nine. But its noir-drenched look-and-feel stamped itself much more indelibly in my mind.

Anyhow, finally recalling the show with the Perry Mason-like theme song, I felt compelled to track its theme down, too. And that — plus a rewatch of the show’s first episode — reminded me of how much the sound of Peter Gunn, as well as its look, profoundly affected my mind. Accordingly, here’s the album of selected music from its first season… an album which, as it happens, won the very first Grammy for “album of the year.” (Having listened to both quite a bit lately, the Gunn theme song itself is — I think — a head or two taller than Perry Mason’s.)

(Aside: I see now that I actually posted about the Gunn theme before, regarding TV crime-series music in general. Some minds think alike, even when they’re really just the same mind in two different time frames!)

One of my favorite binge-watches during this time: the wide selection of material in the Great Courses Plus catalog. So far I’ve watched the complete series called “The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague” (24 lectures), and “How Great Science Fiction Works” (another 24). I’m also working my way through courses (each of 24 lectures, except where noted) on ancient Greece; mystery and suspense fiction (36 lectures); the Biblical Apocrypha; science fiction as philosophy; concepts of time from the perspective of modern physics; the photography of the National Geographic (several courses, 78 lectures all told); and a bunch of other topics. (And all this in addition to selected episodes from the courses which The Missus has selected — the history of cooking, horror fiction, the rise of the novel…)

One course which I have not yet begun: “Latin 101.”

Much to my surprise, I seem to have mentioned my experiences with the Latin in only a single RAMH post, and at that, only glancingly and way the hell back in December 2009. The gist of that story, which I retell here for reasons to become obvious by the end of the post:

At the end of eighth grade, I and my classmates had to select the classes we’d be taking in our first year of high school. At the time, in addition to required courses like English and P.E., we all had to do at least two years of a foreign language. The choices in that small high school included only Spanish, French, and Latin. All my friends were enrolling in Spanish; given my choice, I’d probably have gone with German — but in its absence, well, I figured I’d just follow the crowd. Spanish it would be.

My parents and I sat down at a long table in the cafeteria where faculty high-school faculty members were helping everyone fill out their schedules. I have no idea how we ended up at one table or another — each teacher was handling one kid at a time, reviewing all of his/her course selections (not just the teacher’s own subject area). However it happened, though, we were sat down with a red-faced, blustery guy who introduced himself as Mr. Lombardi. Working through the schedule went pretty routinely until we hit the foreign-language selection.

“Spanish?” he sputtered in disbelief. “SPANISH?!?” It turned out that the teachers had copies of each kid’s grade-school transcripts, including various standardized-test scores. He waved mine in the air. “With his record, he needs to take Latin!“

Face-burning humiliation: I wanted (as the expression goes) to crawl under a rock, or barring that, at least under the table. I had no interest in being considered “exceptional”; I wanted only to be One Of The Guys. No one I knew was taking Latin. Heck, no one in the world even spoke Latin. What would be the point?

Well, somehow or other, Mr. Lombardi made the case satisfactorily to my parents. And I grudgingly went along, freaked out by and resentful about my impending isolation for five hours a week.

Unsurprisingly, of course, Nick Lombardi was in fact the Latin teacher at the school; he’d been so for at least ten years. He had a reputation among the student body — most of whom never had him for class — for a volcanic temperament, most often unleashed upon students who’d failed (always abysmally) Mr. Lombardi’s lofty expectations. “Oh for heaven’s sake,” he’d sputter. “He doesn’t know the answer!” or “She just doesn’t get it!” He never, ever, ever was physically abusive, just explosively disappointed. (He must have chewed antacid tablets like crazy. He literally sputtered as he stalked the aisles, and as the spittle dried on the corners of his mouth it left small white crusty deposits.)

I had, as it happens, a totally unexpected affinity for Latin.

Each year, our school and others around the state — all of the schools which still taught Latin, as far as I know — competed in an academic contest of sorts, sponsored by an organization called APSL (abbreviation for the eye-watering full name, Association for the Promotion of the Study of Latin — or, all right, Associatio ad Promovendum Studium Latinum). All students taking Latin had to take part; it was organized like a standardized test, in which some questions were probably multiple-choice but, as I recall, most actually required translation of some passage or another. I could be wrong, but I think all students, regardless of beginner-intermediate-advanced status, got the same questions. And the first year I took it, out of 120 possible points I got…

…120. (I got the same score the next year. In my junior year, somehow I managed to get only a 118. Sorry. Dunno what came over me.)

No student of Mr. Lombardi’s had ever, ever gotten a perfect score on the APSL exam. And from that moment, I could do (almost) no wrong in his classes: Latin for three years, and while there was no Latin IV class — not enough students interested, maybe — I did take an Advanced Writing class with him as a senior.

It didn’t stop in high school, either: before my freshman year in college, I took a College Board AP test in Latin. As a result, I landed in a junior-level class. But then the next year, I transferred to a college which didn’t offer Latin; I never conjugated another Latin verb nor parsed another Virgilian passage.

Looking back on those years from this lofty in-my-late-60s perspective, I am terribly embarrassed by my responses — inward and, no doubt, outward — to Latin and to Mr. Lombardi. I hated the attention. I hated being thought of as a nerd (I was a nerd, but I hated being taken for one). I hated that The Other Guys got varsity-sports letters and dated and all that stuff, while I could claim recognition only as someone who’d rote-memorized a teacher’s slogan: Latin Aids One in Appreciating the Past, in the Light of the Present, for Future Understanding. And I took Mr. Lombardi for granted — used him — on many occasions: for example, I’d tell him I needed to miss class because the photography club or yearbook staff needed me for some trivial thing or another, and then I’d go and mess around with the darkroom equipment. I did that kind of thing repeatedly, especially in junior and senior years.

At the end of senior year, with a couple of friends I co-hosted the school’s annual talent show. We were a three-man sketch-comedy-and-satire team, styling ourselves as “Gibbs and Company” (none of us were named “Gibbs” of course). A very popular skit, even among faculty we talked to, was the one in which we lampooned Mr. Lombardi as a robot, mechanically spouting Latin and the lessons of Roman civilization using all his catch-phrases. Three guesses which one of us wrote that skit. Three guesses which faculty member we never talked to about it.

Later, when I (rarely) revisited the high school I attended, I’d stop by to see one teacher or another. I never did that with Mr. Lombardi, though. See, I was still afraid he’d embarrass me with effusive praise: embarrass, because I knew, all the way to the soles of my feet, how much I’d gotten from his teaching, how deeply I appreciated him, and how mortifyingly shallow I was to scorn those gifts simply because he offered them — openly, publicly — to no one else.

I was an idiot back then. But now, although I doubt the ghost of Mr. Lombardi will ever care, maybe my dipping back into Latin — at least a little, 50+ years later — maybe that will grant to him, in retrospect, a grain of the respect I genuinely deserved to show him then. I’m sorry, Mr. Lombardi; I’m proud to have made you proud — all outward signs back then to the contrary.