The Photograph - Part Five

Here we are again, at the end of the week. Thanks for the patience. It's been a fun few days around here. I'm hoping to get this wrapped up with minimal blood loss and tears next week. If not, I can guarantee that it will be finished before the 20th of June when I leave for some vacation.

Anyway, grab a cup of coffee--maybe two, depending on how satisfying they are--and grab today's installment of the story. In case you missed the previous entries, check here:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

Sorry if you read this earlier this morning when everything was all chunked up on the top. I forgot that I need to write in the returns now on the html. It should be fixed now.


The shower had left me feeling completely and utterly cleansed--and exhausted. Crashing into the bed back in the cottage, I slept through the remainder of the morning. Again, the birds and their insistent singing forced me awake sometime around noon. After a quick wash in the sink, I bustled about the cottage. I still had two and a half days on the rental agreement before I had to leave, and I was unsure of how to spend the remaining forty-eight hours. I was close to Canada and I thought briefly about driving up to Mars Hill so that I could actually be the first person to see the sunrise, but decided that the experience I had had this morning would be cheapened, almost ruined if I went chasing after the sunrise along the eastern seaboard. Instead, I decided to maybe tour the wilderness, maybe see the famed Mount Katahdin, and take a drive into Canada.

Luckily, I had grabbed the pack where I keep my passport, extra checks, emergency credit cards and the like before I left the house. My original plans were to maybe tour a few of the states along the eastern seaboard, mainly to escape the dull crush of urban and suburban living. Maybe, if I found my way to upstate New York or over to the urban sprawl around Lake Erie, I would stop off in Canada and hit a few casinos. Mostly, I just wanted to take my mind off the job and the ridiculousness that came with it.

Almost on cue, my phone rang. I looked at the number before tossing it back on the bed. Whatever emergency they were dealing with at work could wait--I was really beginning to enjoy not going in to the office every day.

I sat down on the corner of the bed with the folder, pulling from it those things I deemed most important in my life. As I slid the mass of papers from its home, one loose item fluttered to the ground, tumbling end over end as it fell to the ground. Noticing the odd motion out of the corner of my eye, I turned my attention to it, reaching to pick the object up from the floor. I could see that it was a photograph, the image side lying face down on the floor. For a moment, I tried to remember what picture was so important that I would keep it in here.

Then, I turned it over.

∞ ∞ ∞ Without a doubt, Victoria was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

She had eyes that glittered a thousand shades of green when the sun caught them and burned with a smoky sexiness even in the dark. Her cheeks were made for smiling, and even when she was sad or angry, there was a smile hidden somewhere in her features. Her hair--long and blonde, with just enough curl to it that your hand would get caught while you ran your fingers through it--was like gold spun into silk. Her body was firm yet soft, with curves in all the right places. When she lay in my arms, it felt right. When my fingers interlaced with hers, it felt right. When she put her head on my chest and snuggled against me, it felt right.

The first day she stepped on the campus at Saint Alban's, I fell in love with her. I was a sophomore when she first came to school, and as luck would have it, she lived in the dorm next to mine. When I finally got the nerve to ask her to dinner one night, I was amazed that she said yes. After that day, I had eyes for no other woman on campus.

The weekend of my graduation from Saint Alban's was a bittersweet affair. I would finally be done with college; I would have the degree for which I worked so hard. I had already been accepted to business school at Notre Dame. My future looked bright and promising. Unfortunately, I was leaving Tori behind. She would not graduate for another year, and when she did, she would not be following me to South Bend. She had been accepted to medical school at Indiana, and while she would rotate through their South Bend campus, most of the Hoosier State would remain between us while we tried to wrap up schooling.

She stayed on campus on graduation weekend. The weekend was hectic as both my parents and her parents were on campus to see me get my diploma. It seemed as though, every time we turned around, there was another ceremony to go through, another function for us to attend. The night before graduation, there was a dance for the seniors and their families along with the alumni who came back for graduation.

Naturally, I planned on going to the dance with Tori while our parents went to dinner together. Tori looked absolutely stunning, her long hair framing her beautiful features, her eyes sparkling in the low light of the afternoon and her skin glowing in the sepia-stained sunlight. She wore a black dress and though her skin was pale, it complimented her eyes beautifully and made her hair almost glow with an inner radiance.

Before the dance, we walked around campus one last time before I would graduate in the morning. Her parents came with us, though we walked apart from them, hand-in-hand, enjoying the last few moments we still had together. As we walked through the wooded grotto one of Saint Alban's founding priests had constructed, her mom stopped us so that she could get a picture of us.

It was the photograph that had fluttered to the floor moments before. It was the photograph that I held now, the one at which I stared blankly while I replayed those memories through my head of my graduation weekend. When I would drive to see Tori--either at Saint Alban's or down at Indiana--I would leave this photograph on the dashboard to remind me why I was driving for hours to spend a little time with this woman.

I could not have loved her more.

Life after graduation was going to be tough, and I knew that it would take some adjustments. The first year of school, I would drive back to Saint Alban's on the weekends, and it was almost as if there was no distance between us. We made love passionately, lovingly. We laughed. We enjoyed each other's company, each other's presence.

It was similar when she got to Bloomington. We would fall into each other's arms on Friday night and tearily say our long, lingering good-byes on Sundays. Rarely, she could escape her commitments and come to visit me in South Bend. In between weekend visits, we would talk on the phone until late at night, or chat via computer. Though it was tough, things were working.

When she entered her second year of medical school, and just as I was beginning to finish my final year, Tori began to grow more distant. Often, she would cut our conversations short, telling me that she was exhausted. Sometimes, she would be too busy for our weekend visits. Though I missed her, I understood. I knew medical school was a tremendous commitment, and I was working on finishing up my degree and preparing to look for a job. Things were hectic, to say the least, for both of us. Our calls began to be less frequent; we would go weeks at a time without visiting one another. The long distance in our relationship was finally beginning to show.

I had managed to secure an interview with a firm in Indianapolis, and while that was still a fair distance from Bloomington, it was far closer than South Bend. After my interview, I went back to my hotel room feeling good about the entire day. I dialed Tori, thinking I could surprise her since I was just a short drive away.

"Hey, guess what," I said when she answered the phone.

"I dunno, what?"

"I'm in Indy. I had an interview, but I'm wrapped up. You up for a late dinner?"

There was a long pause and then finally I heard her say something incomprehensible.

"Hey, are you okay?" I pressed. I heard her sob. My throat began to tighten.

"I'm sorry, Rob," she said, her voice choked with emotion and barely above a whisper, "but I've met someone..."

The Photograph - Part Four

This is the fourth part of the story I'm writing for a dear friend of mine. Grab a cup of coffee and get caught up on the first three parts of the tale if you need.
The Photograph Part 1
The Photograph Part 2
The Photograph Part 3


The figures in the photograph have been transformed into strange, inverse images of themselves as they're repeatedly reflected on the inside of my windshield. The night, the amber glow of the sodium lamps and time have colluded to change the shorter one's hair from blonde to brunette. Time itself has rendered the other figure's hair a different shade.

The interstate is behind me now. The illumination brought by the roadside lamps is more constant, but the period of the sweep from the photograph's reflection is short, more stuttering. It is no longer a lengthening and stretching; now it is more of a ghoulish reflection, flashing sporadically on the inside of my windshield. The image's pulsing apparition matches my heartbeat; the rapidity at which the picture appears--reflected, reversed, inversed--mimics the crush of emotions spilling from the depths of my memory. Some happy, some sad, but the entire gamut comes to the forefront as I stare at the photograph itself while waiting for an interminable light to change to green. The blue glow of my phone's screen sheds a differing contrast on the image, making the reflection all the more ghastly.

Finally, the light switches green. I turn to left, the image stretches and follows along.

∞ ∞ ∞

The alarm went off at a disturbingly early time. The night was still dark, and the world was quiet. The rain from the previous day had brought with it a lingering chill that clung to the night air. I did not bother to shower, but my Saint Alban's shirt was hanging in the bathroom of the cottage, drying from the previous day's drizzle that had soaked through the fabric. Though the shirt had dried in the hours between my walk through the emptied streets of Bar Harbor and the insane predawn hour I roused myself, the night's chill saturated the garment like yesterday's rain had. Shrugging it on, I waited for my body to warm the inside of the jacket before leaving the cottage. It was the warmest piece of clothing I had brought with me, and I was not going to leave without it.

There was a road to drive up the mountain, but I opted for the more difficult way of trying to decipher the labyrinthine trails that lead to Cadillac Mountain's summit. The night was cold and the sky was dark--a perfect dome of diamond-encrusted black stretching forever in all directions. Not even the meager light offered by the sleeping town below dimmed the lighted symphony of the night sky. Though the tree cover was thick along the trails, I could see through the canopy enough to keep an eye on where the north star hung in the black tapestry. Like so many mariners before me, I navigated my way through the night by that one unmoving beacon as the rest of the stars danced in slow circles around that singular point of white.

I did my best to keep the North Star before me so that the east was to my right, but the trails wound around and up. The paths were not simple to navigate, and I cursed my stupidity for trying to climb a mountain in the dark. I could hear other cars on the road climbing the mountain, so I knew I would not be alone when I finally made it somewhere that I could clearly look out over the ocean. Cursing the people who took the easy way up, I pushed forward, sweat running down my brow and between my shoulder blades despite the halo of frost hanging before me with each breath.

Finally, I came to one of the areas on the top cleared for people like me--those who mistakenly thought that they would be first thing the sun would touch when it came over the eastern edge of the world. Already, the eastern sky looked bruised along the flat line of the horizon, greens and lighter blues replacing the deep blue and black of night. The moon had set hours ago; the stars were now retreating from the oncoming sun.

The viewing area was already populated, though there were not many people around. As I looked out over the inky spill of ocean forming the distant horizon, I caught slivers of clandestine conversations. People complained that it was cold, that it was early, that they were tired. I tried to push their voices out of my mind. Instead, I watched silently while the eastern half of the world began the gentle move toward morning.

The change was gradual at first. The darkness of the eastern sky faded and the soft hues of dawn climbed slowly into the sky, a reverse rainbow spreading across the horizon from one edge of the world to the next. The waters slowly transformed from liquid black to soft gray to a strange, colorless liquid that seemed to swallow the light from the sky. Shapes slowly began to emerge from the night-dark sea, and I could see the beautifully-folded rocks that comprised the shoreline tumbling away into the waters of the Atlantic.

For lack of anything else to do, I lit a cigarette while the edge of the world faded from pink to orange to the yellow that rides before the sun's actual emergence above the eastern horizon. The waters of the Atlantic flushed with color as the thinnest edge of the sun finally came over the rim of the world. An orange sliver of brilliant light slipped above the perfectly straight line where the water met the sky, and I stood, breathless, as the day slowly spread over the world.

Somewhere farther to the north, they saw this happen a few seconds before I did, but I did not care. There are very few things in the world that are more beautiful than watching the sun rise over the ocean, but to do it from the top of the tallest point for a few miles around goes beyond breathtaking. It was as if the world was coming alive with each drop of sunlight that fell upon it.

Something within me moved, and for a moment I thought I was going to have an emotional breakdown. I felt my mind spinning out of control, all the stresses of the recent weeks suddenly breaking free and jointing the torrent of emotions swirling within my head. Taking a deep breath, I tried to drink in the morning. I felt the sun's warmth finally fall on my face, the chill slowly ebbing away with the night.

I watched as the orange ball slowly began to emerge over the horizon; to my back, the last vestiges of night were being swept away while the earliest moments of dawn seized the sky. For just a second, as I took in my surroundings, trying to look at everything at once as the beauty of the day broke before me, I felt a calmness surge up and through me. The emotional wreck that had threatened to drag me down a moment before was gone; in its place was a serenity that I had not felt in years. At the edges of the warmth that burned within my chest, I could feel something dangerously akin to happiness. Involuntarily, a smile tugged at the edges of my mouth.

Perhaps the old man I met in the diner had been right after all.

The wind changed, switching around and blowing in more from the ocean, carrying the sweetly bitter iodine scent of the water with it. Even the smell of dying and rotting sea weed had a calming effect on me.

"Hey!" someone barked, "You can't smoke that up here. It's state property." He had a kind of hipster smugness in the smirk he shot me after castigating me over my half-smoked cigarette. It was the kind of look that would start a fight in a bar. For half a second, my hand curled into a fist before I reached up to my mouth and plucked the burning stick from my lips.

"Lucky for me that I just quit, huh?" I said, taking the cigarette and crushing it against the sole of my foot. Ash and unburned tobacco fell to the ground. I took the dead cigarette with me as I turned and began to walk back down the mountain.

The Photograph - Part Three

In case you missed the first couple of installations of this story, you can find them here:

Part One
Part Two



I awoke to a cold drizzle dribbling down through the blackened, predawn skies. During the night, rain had moved in from off the coast, chilling the air and cancelling sunrise. I sat in the cottage and watched as the world lightened, but saw no true dawn. The coffee I drank was little compensation for the distance I had driven only to be preempted by the rains.

Truthfully, I had forgotten that I was not as young as I once was. Sitting in the car had taken its toll, and while lying in bed during the predawn darkness and listening to the rain, I felt the aches in my joints and my muscles more than I heard the call of the mountain. Facing the ceiling, I listened to the rain falling outside my open window until the morning light shifted from black to dull gray. I rolled over, conceded defeat, and slept for another couple of hours until I could no longer ignore the birdsong trilling in the bushes outside my windows.

The rain fell, calmly but relentlessly, throughout the morning, bringing with it a chill to the air that seemed out of place in the middle of the summer. I spent much of the morning staring out from the porch of the cottage across the buildings of the town and toward the sliver of the bay afforded by the closeness of the trees and buildings. Where the water was a bright crystalline blue and bustling with sailboats and smaller craft the day before, it was now slate gray and abandoned. The clouds matched the water: a uniform gray that leaked water from the monochromatic dome.

I stood leaning against a support column on the front of the porch, sipping coffee and watching the town sleepily stir, though the bustle from the previous day was gone. I pulled a final drag from a cigarette and tossed the butt on the path leading to the front of the porch. Staring down at it, the spent reminder of a bad habit seemed so out of place in this humble and almost perfectly-manicured town that I stepped into the mist and retrieved it. Crushing the butt against the column, I carried it inside and left it in the sink while I prepared to explore the town anew. Boredom was driving me forward and hunger was forcing me out of lethargic inactivity.

As I had noted from the front porch, the town was still mostly asleep as I wandered through it, my only protection against the elements a hooded sweatshirt from my college days that seemed to absorb more of the rain than deflect it. The shirt still fit and was in mostly good shape, despite the faded "Saint Alban's College" written across the front in what had once been navy blue. It was the most comfortable article of clothing I owned.

I found a small family-run restaurant just off the main part of the renovated downtown that could best be--and probably only be--described as a "dive". It was the sort of place that felt as if the rest of the town had been built up around it, and the aroma of the ghosts of ten thousand hamburgers hung in the air. One could tell right away that it was a place visited by "regulars", but the kind that would welcome anyone new into the fold, as a lost sheep that had wandered away from the herd. Entering the diner, I felt the eyes of strangers weighing on me, deciding I was not a risk, and returning to conversations about the weather, aches and pains, and begonias.

The most convenient available seat was a stool next to the counter, and I sat down next to an old man with hunched shoulders wearing a flannel shirt and a hat pulled down so far over his face it seemed he had no neck. His ears stood out from his head, and the bottom part of the hat pushed them out at ninety-degree angles from his skull. The waitress--a girl probably a decade my junior, pretty, perky and smiling--stepped over to see what I wanted while the cook bellowed relayed orders in the kitchen. Staring through the window at him, I strongly considered finding a new place to eat; my stomach refused to allow my legs to move, so I asked for a coffee and what the menu called "The Breakfast Beast". Against my better judgment, I decided that a burger with a fried egg, sausage patty and two slices of bacon was a good substitute for skipping breakfast. Plus, it would go well with my coffee.

"Where the hell is Saint Alban's?" I turned to find the neckless old man next to me studying my shirt the way I had studied the ass of the waitress as she handed my order through the window.

"What? Oh. It's a little school in a town just west of Pittsburgh. Maybe thirty miles or so out from there."

"So, you from Pissburgh?" At first, I thought the old man was trying to goad me into an argument and then I suddenly realized that it was simply his way of talking. The old Down East accent hung on every abbreviated syllable that came out of his mouth. After a moment or two, it suddenly became endearing.

"Ohio, originally. My parents moved to Pittsburgh when I was high school, so I found a school that wasn't too far from home, but far enough away that I could find an excuse not to drive home on weekends."

"And what did you study there, titties?" It was joke he had obviously been sitting on for a while.

I laughed with a smirk. "Only one pair."

"Ah, a good Catholic boy, huh?" he grinned. Despite the sideways insults, I was beginning to like the old bastard.

"Drinking, smoking and lots of premarital sex with my girlfriend," I said, winking as the waitress topped off my coffee cup and set the massive, heart-stopping cathedral of cholesterol before me. For a second I stared at the monstrosity of the burger and decided to pick at the tater tots added on the side while my neighbor felt talkative.

He pointedly looked at my left hand while I fiddled with the tater tots. I popped one in my mouth expecting the next question, but it never came. Instead, my chatty companion fell silent for a second, nodding his head sagely while a brooding silence seemed to encapsulate us. Looking down at his cup, he swirled his coffee around, the black mud clinging to the sides for a moment before returning to the puddle at the bottom.

"You on vacation up here?" he finally asked, shooting me a quizzical eye.

"I needed to get away for a while is all," I said nodding. I finally taking a bite of my burger. Chewing it, I stared into an untold distance. "I've always wanted to visit Maine. Thought I'd come up and check out Cadillac before exploring the rest of the state a bit more."

"If you want to see the first sunrise, Cadillac ain't the place this time of year," the old man stated with a half-grin. "You'll have to head up to Mars Hill."

"No shit?" I asked, setting the burger down. "How far of a drive is that? Few minutes?"

The old man laughed. "Yep, you're not from around here. Mars Hill's up north, son. Couple of hours, if you don't get lost. If you do, you'll run out of gas before you find the hill."

"Well, damn," I said. I stared down into the depths of my coffee cup, suddenly deflated. I couldn't believe that Gene Forrester had led me astray.

"Still, there's a helluva view up there," the old man said, as if trying to lift my spirits. He finished off his cup of coffee and stood, laying a couple of dollars down on the counter next to his empty mug. "Helluva good place to sort things out, too, where it's you, the mountain and God." He slapped me on the back and headed out the door.

I sat for a while and pushed my tater tots around on my plate before paying the bill and heading back to the cottage where I could wait out the rest of the rain and hope that tomorrow would bring me sunnier skies and a clearer view of everything.

∞ ∞ ∞

The Photograph - Part 2

In case you missed the first part of the story, you can get caught up here: The Photograph - Part 1

When I was a sophomore in high school, we had to read John Knowles' A Separate Peace. It was one of the few books that fell into the required reading category that I liked; for some reason, the thing that stuck with me most from the story was the mention of Cadillac Mountain in Maine. As the story put it, Cadillac Mountain was the first place the sun's rays touched in the morning in the continental United States. Ever since I was fifteen, I wanted to visit the place, to look out over the ocean as it changed from night black to the hues of the morning.

The day after my doctor's appointment, I got up, made myself a pot of coffee and looked out the window of the kitchen in my townhouse across the street to yet another strip mall. People wandered up and down the sidewalks, phones pressed to their ears, gabbing gleefully without taking note of anyone or anything around them. The longer I stood there, the more angry I became. Finally, I finished my coffee, went into my bedroom, and began tossing together a bag. I needed to escape my home for a while. I needed to escape everything for a while.

I got in the car and I started to drive. I had no particular destination in mind at the time. All I knew was that I needed to escape, to get away from the press of humanity and the way everyone around me ignored the fleeting beauty of life. I was not sure what was wrong with me. Maybe I was a little crazy, maybe there was something wrong in my head. Whatever the reason, I knew that the road was the only thing that could cure me.

A few hours later, I had checked into a bed and breakfast in Virginia's wine country. From the balcony of the room I rented, I could see the sun settling slowly over the mountains, and while it was nice to be away from the city, there was still something that I was missing. I wandered around the grounds, walking over to the closest vineyard and sampling the wines they had to offer. I bought a half-dozen bottles, more out of a sense of obligation and decency rather than any burning desire to drink. Returning to my room, I opened the door to the balcony and watched as the sun slowly sank over the Appalachians.

As the gloaming slowly spread over the valley, I got up to turn on a bedside lamp so that I would not stumble in the dark later when I decided to find my bed. As I twisted the switch on, I glanced at the stack of books that were set decoratively on the bedside table. In the middle was a copy of John Knowles' A Separate Peace. Memories came flooding back to me as I picked the book up and thumbed through the yellowed, brittle pages. My eyes scanned across pages, parts of the story flooded over me, flowed through me. I came to the part where Finny fell a second time; after reading it, I carefully closed the book and laid it on the table next to the bed. Walking over to the doorway leading to the balcony, I picked up the glass of wine that I had been nursing most of the evening. The midnight blue rises of the mountains against the deepening purple of the evening sky commanded my view and, as I reflected on the pages I had just flipped through, I knew where tomorrow would take me.

∞ ∞ ∞

Bar Harbor, Maine was exactly what I thought a New England coastal city would be--or, I suspect, it is exactly what I am expected to think a New England coastal city should be. A remade downtown area sat next to the deep blue harbor overlooking the scattered islands of the northern coast. The central part of town was ringed by cottages and homes, all of them well-maintained, and most with nice views of the harbor, which was covered with sailboats. This was all nested within gently rolling, tree-covered hills. In all, it was beautiful and serene, a sharp contrast to home and even most of the drive to Maine.

Once I had regained the road, the route had been through mostly urban areas. The cities, the traffic, and the noise pressed in on me through most of my journey. Only once I had escaped Boston did trees once again become prevalent, but it was not until I entered Maine was I convinced that I had found my way back to the natural world. Leaving the bulwarks of the urban jungle behind me, I turned off the super highway near Augusta, fully planning on following the lesser-used routes out to the eastern seaboard. At times, I actually pulled alongside the highway and got out of my car just to look at the rise and fall of the land around me, to feel the openness and calm of my new bucolic surroundings.

The remainder of my drive was leisurely. I would stop and look through roadside vegetable stands. Everything was blueberry-flavored here, and I did not care. For the sheer novelty, I bought blueberry beer. It went along with my blueberry preserves, blueberry syrup and chocolate-covered blueberries. For a change of pace, I would buy something cranberry-related; though there were fewer cranberry products, the vendors were just as prolifically creative in using the red bog berries for their roadside concoctions.

Eventually, I could fit no more berry-based foodstuffs in my car, so I continued on, taking several winding highways that appeared to have been laid out to give the best views of the low, scenic mountains. The views were not typically wide-ranging, with trees pushing in on all sides. While the endless forest did not allow for long vistas of the surrounding land, the sea of trees did carry an allure all of their own. There was something enticing about the primordial forest; the thought of driving into the woods and never coming out crossed my mind from time to time as I slowly wound my way back and forth through the scenic hills and valleys of eastern Maine.

I had read stories about people going into the Maine wilderness and getting lost. Reading the stories, I was amazed--almost appalled--that someone could get lost in a time when global positioning satellites could pinpoint your location within thirty feet. Driving through even the eastern part of the state, where the forest was not as intensely unsettled as the wilderness would be, I suddenly understood. Resisting the urge to truly become one with my surroundings, I pressed on and soon found the coast. The road wound around and through more hills, valleys and great, primordial woods, but soon I found signs pointing me toward Mount Desert Island and Bar Harbor.

I had called ahead to find somewhere to stay, grabbing a cottage on the outskirts of the town proper where I could have access to Cadillac Mountain. It was small and white and almost exactly what I expected a cottage to look like in Bar Harbor, Maine--or, again, perhaps it was what I was expected to expect a cottage to look like. It was small and it offered a small view of the bay; the water was dazzlingly blue in the afternoon sun, and what seemed like a thousand white sailboats plied the waters. I quickly unloaded what I needed into the small, one bedroom cottage. After a quick survey of what was in the unit--surprise, more blueberry pancake syrup--I got out and stretched my legs.

The seaside part of town had been rebuilt--or at least redone--to make walking more accessible for anyone staying in the town. Clearly, tourism was a major source of income for the people here, but this did not bother me. It was good to be out of the car, to walk through sun-warmed streets and feel the breeze blowing in off the ocean, to smell the briny aroma of the sea. The people I passed were friendly and courteous, and one couple suggested a good place to sample some of the local fare. I wandered the streets some more, window shopping and genuinely enjoying being out of my car for a while before I went to find dinner.

While I had seen foods incorporating blueberries and cranberries almost since crossing the border, now I was on the coast and that meant that the shift was to what the sea provided. I ate myself almost sick on seafood and--no surprise here--I washed down the meal with blueberry wines that came from Maine's own burgeoning wine industry. In all, the meal was delicious, but I did not linger long over my dinner. Once I had paid, I took a stroll around the town once more, hoping to walk off some of the enormous amounts of food I had eaten. After finishing a cigarette, I made my way back to my cottage, taking one long look over my shoulder at the wine-dark waters of the sea. Hesitating at the door to the cottage, I looked past the humble, white building toward the looming behemoth backlit by a sun that had set nearly forty-five minutes before. Nodding to it, as if it watched me, I bid the rocky heap good night.

Tomorrow, I would conquer the mountain.

Friday Morning Latin Lesson: Vol. CII

While we're brushing the dust off archaeological digs (read: my blog), we might as well dive right into the deep end of the dead language pool. Plus, someone said they missed the Friday Morning Latin Lesson; that's like inviting a vampire into your home. Ill-advised at best, and down-right encouraging of debaucherous behavior if we're being frank.

What's the occasion? Well, there's a couple of things going on today. On May 25, 240 BC, the first recorded track of Halley's comet was noted in some Chinese scientific writing. There's a chance that the comet that was reported in Greece (and possibly Babylon) in 467 BC was also Comet Halley, but we can't be certain of that. Evidence points in that direction, but no one has the balls to come out and say it. Yet.

Again, on May 25, in 567 king Servius Tullius held a triumph to celebrate his victory over the Etruscans. Servius Tullius was the sixth, and probably best, King of Rome (the first was the Big R himself, Romulus). He was a bit of a socialist, though, as he was one of the first to want to spread the wealth from the noble families to the poor of Rome's citizenry. This would prove to bite him in the ass later on. He also helped to lay the foundation for what would become the Roman Republic. In general, Servius was pretty well-liked, aside from his political rivals, who ended up murdering him. Details, details...

As with any character of Roman history, there's an entertaining backstory with Servius. His mother was a lady named Ocrisia who was probably captured from the Latins (there was an actual people, from whom the language arose...they lived in the "flat lands") during one of the wars between Rome and the Latin League. She arrived in Rome pregnant (most likely) and as she was a woman of noble birth, she was given to the king's wife to act as a servant. There, she gave birth to Servius; the baby, being born in the king's household, became a member of his extended family. Eventually he would grow up and marry the king's daughter and, when the king (Lucius Tarquinius Priscus) was murdered, Servius ascended the throne in Rome.

There's also a story that Ocrisia (still captured from the Latins) arrived in Rome as a virgin and was given over to serve as a Vestal Virgin (Vesta was keeper of the hearth flame at home, and she was one of those ever-virgin goddesses). Ocrisia, by her noble birth, was then sent to serve in the king's household, performing the rites and rituals of Vesta for the king. One day, after offering a sacrifice on the holy fires within the king's hearth, Ocrisia damped the flames. Apparently, Ocrisia turned around and shook some of that sweet virgin ass at the hearth, because a disembodied dick rose from the remains of the fire and penetrated Ocrisia. The child she bore was Servius Tullius, the child who would become king.

Oh, and despite the fact that she was a servant of Vesta (who presumably didn't have a dick), it was widely accepted that Vulcan was the father of the child...which is probably why he moved his forge under Mount Etna, to avoid child support payments and such. While Vesta was in charge of the sacred flame of the hearth, Vulcan was the god in charge of fire used in defense of the city.

This wasn't the only run-in that Servius had with the divine, however. During his reign as king, Servius expanded Rome's territory, spread the city across the surrounding hills, founded several temples in the name of various goddesses (Diana and Fortuna being the main ones), expanded the vote, reorganized the divisions of Roman society, improved the military and helped to keep the plebians happy by spreading some of the wealth from the top of society down through the lower ranks. It was said that Servius had so much luck on his side that Fortuna, the goddess associated with good luck, sneaked in through his window at night so that they rucked like hounds. Apparently, he did not inherit daddy's floating dick trick.

Wow. Not only did he get to bang the daughter of the previous king, but he also spent his nights in the arms of the goddess of good fortune? Talk about one lucky bastard. It sure brings this little phrase to mind:

Bonum est regem esse!
Pronounced: "Boh-noom est ray-gaim aye-say!"

Regal translation in the hovertext!
The name Servius is an interesting one. Since Ocrisia was most likely a slave--at the very best, a servant for the queen--people have noted the similarity between her son's name "Servius" and the Latin word for "slave", which was servus. Servius as a name probably comes from a root meaning "to keep or to preserve", but the similarity was enough that Rome's enemies used it as a sign of weakness in one of the Republic's founding fathers. Mithridates, the Poison King of Pontus, whom Julius Caesar had to personally destroy after Mithridates' fourth or fifth rebellion (incidentally, it was Pontus about which Caesar uttered his famous "vini, vidi, vinci"), was one such person to pun on Servius' name. He pointed out that even the Roman kings included "slaves and house servants of the Etruscan (people)", basically thumbing his nose at Roman rule, their citizens and their leadership.

Whatever the story, the links between the slave class and the name Servius was enough that the name fell out of vogue by about the time that the Roman Republic was established, despite the popularity of the king who carried the same name. Despite being born a slave (or of a slave), Servius is considered Rome's best king and overall one of the best rulers the city/republic/empire had.

Not bad for a guy whose father was a severed dick.