Sappho’s Supermoon

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Uncomely and Broken

A few days ago, I posted a piece about a Homeric passage that the recent supermoon reminded me of.  But I’ve just realized that there is a description by Sappho, in a short poem not entirely complete, that I like even better.  The original text is below, with a translation of my own after it.

Sappho, Poem 34

Ἄστερες μὲν ἀμφὶ κάλαν σελάνναν
ἂψ ἀπυκρύπτοισι φάεννον εἶδος,
ὄπποτα πλήθοισα μάλιστα λάμπῃ
γᾶν … ἀργυρία …

Stars near the moon hide
when she causes earth to glow
in lovely silver. …

Yeah, it’s a haiku, I know, so that’s a little cheesy.  But Greek lyric poetry strikes me as having the same sort of oblique quality that can be found in a good haiku.  I fooled a little with the photo (the original of which I found here), but I like the moonlit ruin, since it picks up on the content as well as the fragmentary nature of the poem.

Posted in Astronomical, Classics, Poetry | 2 Comments

Vos Salutamus

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Uncomely and Broken

My chief duty on graduation weekend in Sewanee is to coach the salutatorian on the Latin address.  The Commencement ceremony on Sunday begins with greetings in turn to the Chancellor and the Episcopal bishops whose dioceses own the university, the Vice-Chancellor and other administrators, the graduating class and lower-class students, parents, siblings, friends, and guests, all of it delivered in rather ornate formulaic language, and all of it in Latin. I’ve pasted the text with a translation below, in case you’re interested.

The person who has to say all of this is the salutatorian, and he or she will usually have no idea about this little ordeal until just about 72 hours beforehand.  The faculty turn in their grades for seniors on the Wednesday before graduation and the registrar’s office then heroically crunches all the numbers.  Final grade-point averages are calculated, and those at the bottom of the class sweat it out to see if they will be marching while those at the very top wait to find out who will be #1 and #2.  Once the grades are all calculated, the valedictorian is informed, and off they go to write up an address for delivery at Commencement.  The salutatorian, poor thing, is told to go see me.

Now and then, a student who has had some Latin will become salutatorian, of course, but many times the salutatory is the first time they will have encountered the old dead language.  My heart goes out to these people, and I have often wondered how I might feel in an analogous situation.  What if, during one of the busiest weekends of my life, I were told that I had to give a page-long tribute in public in Mandarin Chinese?  The fortunate thing, however, is that it isn’t me who has to do this, but somebody who is really, really smart.  The salutatorian is invariably a person with a GPA over 4.0, which means they routinely have been given A+s.

After yesterday’s Baccalaureate ceremony, I met with this year’s salutatorian, Brian Fennessy, in All Saints chapel to go over the address.  In addition to what must be said, there is also what one associate dean has called “the choreography,” since there is a fair bit of moving around.  The opening remarks are delivered to the chancellor and the bishops at the high altar, with the rest of it spoken down by the front of the choir stalls.  The videographer accompanies us as we rehearse it, so he will know where Brian is going as the address unfolds.

But at the heart of the thing is the language itself.  I have often been asked about the pronunciation of the Latin used at Sewanee.  It’s a church-affiliated institution, but we do not use “Church Latin” here.  I love the way Church Latin and all its rolling Italianate sound.  Of course, the choir customarily sings in Church Latin, with Gloria given to God “in ex-Chell-sis.”  But the Latin used at Sewanee has always been pronounced with a Classical Accent.  That means the C’s sound like K’s, and the V’s sound like W’s.  And for poor Brian, who has studied French here, that means some radical readjustment.  The first words of the address are a mouthful, no doubt about it.  Cancellarie Reverendissime, “Most reverend Chancellor.”  Kank-ell-Ar-ee-ay Re (short e!)-We (another short e!) -rend-iss-im-ay.

[Actually, it’s even worse.  The final syllables should be pronounced as short e’s as well, but since everyone has heard “Et tu Brutay,” good luck with that. Also, these are generally Southerners we’re talking about, who lengthen every vowel they encounter.]

[[And if you’re really looking to confuse someone, try to explain why this vocative isn’t a simple -i instead of -ie, as it ought to be, if Wheelock’s Latin Grammar is to be trusted, which in this case, it isn’t]]

Yikes.  How will Brian do today? Well, based on our practice today, I know he will do splendidly.  Give an address in Latin?  It’s a challenge, sure, but I have yet to meet the salutatorian who didn’t thrive on just such challenges.  Vos salutamus, salutatorians, past, present, and future.  We salute you.

[Update, May 23: How did Brian do?  As predicted, splendidly. It’s always a pleasure to watch a bright person confront and resolve a problem!  And look like he was enjoying it, to boot!]

SEWANEE LATIN SALUTATORY

Cancellarie reverendissime, huius universitatis princeps et pastor ecclesiae sanctae Domini nostri, te salutamus.

Patres in Deo, huius universitatis fideles custodes, vos salutamus.

Pro-Cancellarie nobilissime, societatis academicae nostrae dux fidelis et diligens, te salutamus.

Praeposite dignissime et decani illustres et sacerdos universitatis et professores sapientes, qui nos in quaestum veritatis amoremque rationis duxistis, vos salutamus.

Salvete hospites grati et condiscipuli fortunati.

Salvete discipuli inferiores.  Videte ut mores huius universitatis fideliter conservetis.

Salvete matres patresque amati, fratres, sorores et amici fideles.

Pro nobis omnibus qui in gradus eruditionis hodie admittamur, vos omnes in hac sollemni convocatione saluto, et vos spero semper habituros esse felicitatem et prosperitatem.

ECCE QUAM BONUM ET IUCUNDUM EST HABITARE FRATRES IN UNUM!

Most reverend Chancellor, head of this university and shepherd of Our Lord’s holy church, we salute you.

Fathers in God, faithful custodians of this university, we salute you.

Most noble Vice-Chancellor, faithful and diligent leader of our academic institution, we salute you.

Most worthy Provost, illustrious Deans, University Chaplain, and wise professors who lead us in the search for truth and the love of reason, we salute you.

Greetings, dear guests and fortunate fellow-students.

Greetings, lower-class students. See to it that you faithfully preserve the character of this university.

Greetings, beloved mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters and loyal friends.

On behalf of all who today are entering upon this step of learning, I salute all of you in this solemn convocation, and I hope that you will ever have happiness and well-being.

BEHOLD HOW GOOD AND JOYFUL IT IS WHEN BROTHERS LIVE TOGETHER IN UNITY!

Posted in Education, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

O Swallow, Swallow

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Uncomely and Broken

My friend David Haskell asked his students on their Ornithology final, “If you could come back as a bird, which species would you choose and why?”   As I responded in the Comments section of his blog, my choice would be Hirundo Rustica, the barn swallow.  I’ve long admired their sleek appearance and graceful flight, and I’m not alone in that.  The Spring Fresco at Thera dates back to 1500 BC:

A close-up of the swallows– aren’t they sweet?

I didn’t know this until just now when searching, but the Spring Fresco features in the Disney movie Hercules, on the wall in the home where  the hero grew up.  Who knew the animators were so learned?

Posted in Birds, Cartoons, Classics | 1 Comment

Night-piece

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Uncomely and Broken

Behind Gailor Hall (May 5, 2012, 10 p.m.)

Tonight’s “supermoon” puts me in mind of a passage from the Iliad.  A long day’s battle has been raging outside the walls of Troy, but by the end of Book Eight, the Trojans have taken the field and determinedly set up camp.  They sit around their fires, and Homer gives us what has been called “the most beautiful night-piece that can be found in Poetry.”  As Robert Fagles translates,

                                  And so [the warriors’] spirits soared
as they took positions down the passageways of battle
all night long, and the watchfires blazed among them.
Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glittering
round the moon’s brilliance blaze in all their glory
when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm …
all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs
and the steep ravines and down from the high heavens bursts
the boundless bright air and all the stars shine
clear and the shepherd’s heart exults­—so many fires burned
between the ships and the Xanthus’ whirling rapids
set by the men of Troy, bright against their walls.
A thousand fires were burning there on the plain
And beside each fire sat fifty fighting men
poised in the leaping blaze, and champing oats
and glistening barley, stationed by their chariots,
stallions waited for Dawn to mount her glowing throne.

The analogy between the stars and the watch-fires strikes me as especially inventive, since it encompasses not only the brilliance but also the numberlessness of each, all of it spread out in prospect before us.  I have had this experience myself.  From Morgan’s Steep in Sewanee, you can look out on a clear night and see a great many stars in the sky seeming to mirror the street-lamps of Franklin County beneath.  It’s always a heartening sight.

The passage’s pièce de résistance, of course, is the moon illuminating the lands below it, the refulgent lamp of night, as Alexander Pope had put it in his own translation, that O’er heaven’s pure azure spreads her sacred light.  Such light, Homer observes, delights the herdsmen, who otherwise would have to stand guard in the dark.  It is hard not to recall here the shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night in the Nativity story (to whom another sort of light would appear).  We forget in our modern age how the husbandry that was done nocturnally not even so long ago would be made so much easier by a moon-lit sky. The warrior’s work, too, was far different in the pre-electric age, and only the stallions champing their oats might still feel at home in Homer’s world.

What I have never seen from Morgan’s Steep, of course, is the very thing Homer describes.  In fact, nobody has ever seen a full moon with stars visible all around it.  Does this make the simile a failure?  Certainly Wordsworth thought so, and he shook his head about a poet who felt that “the visible universe was of so little consequence … that it was scarcely necessary for him to cast his eyes upon it.”  Even so, Pope had defended Homer’s impulse a century before.  “A Poet is not obliged to speak with the exactness of Philosophy, but with the Liberty of Poetry,” he observed, speaking of this very passage from the Iliad.

Pope’s invocation of poetic license here seems about right.  Sometime later Robert Frost would write in “Birches,” But I was going to say when Truth broke in / With all her matter-of-fact, then asking in plaintive parenthesis, (Now am I free to be poetical?). Homer hardly needs our permission to be poetical, I suppose.  Still, on a night like tonight, with its rare supermoon, it is easy to imagine the landscape he’s talking about, one in which stars and watch-fires or maybe street-lamps are so numerous that they seem to come together into a single whole, burning with such intensity that even those in the lonesome darkness (soldiers, field-workers, or perhaps just professors grading finals) find some comfort in the serviceable light.

Posted in Astronomical, Bible, Classics, Military, Poetry, Sewanee | 3 Comments

Angry Bird

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Uncomely and Broken

Usually the phoebe’s nest is a chirpy little bundle on the drainpipe out back, but this spring it is silent, and for this we blame the towhee.  We’re not sure when he arrived, but he has been a constant presence on the deck now for a week.  The mornings begin with his trill– to-whee! to-whee!— and then a bapping at the windows, as he shadow-boxes with himself for dominance.  The other birds seem to give him wide berth.  We think the cardinals are rolling their eyes about all of this, but perhaps they are more forgiving than we give them credit for.  The mornings have been bright and warm, and certainly encourage the kinder interpretation.

Posted in Birds, Sewanee, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

By the Rude Bridge

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Uncomely and Broken

Those are my boys, standing by the Old North Bridge in Concord, grimly determined to face down the Redcoats, and wondering when we can get some ice cream.  The picture was taken a few years ago when we were spending the summer in Boston.  In the background you can see Daniel Chester French’s statue of the Minuteman, on the base of which is inscribed Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous lines:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The battle of Concord took place two hundred and thirty seven years ago today.  As it happens, one of my ancestors, James Joseph Byron, was the caretaker of the Old North Bridge and the battleground in the late nineteenth century.  Like my great-great-grandmother, Ann Burns, whom I have discussed before, he was an Irish immigrant and had settled in Concord.  She had been the cook for Emerson, though whether it was through his good graces that James Byron became custodian of the historic site I could not say.  (That’s him late in life below, in a photo lifted from a genealogy written by my late cousin, Bobby Byron.)

When I had had my sons pose at the bridge for the photo at the top, I knew the Battle of Concord as a matter of American history only.  I was not aware that it was also a part of our family history as well.  I’m not sure the boys would have been too impressed, however, had I known to tell them.

Later that day, we had gone to watch a demonstration of a live musket firing.  There was an elderly man in period dress who spoke in great detail about things like the route the British may have taken and the proper way to load a musket.  When I think of him now, it seems to me that his lecture was probably much like one old James Byron might have given.  I wonder if, long ago, little boys listening to him tugged on their father’s hand and asked, “Is he ever gonna shoot that thing, daddy?”

Posted in Boston, Family, Ireland, Military, Poetry, Statues & Monuments | Leave a comment

Major Archibald Butt

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Uncomely and Broken

Major Archibald Butt has a funny name, it cannot be denied— Major Butt! Har har har— but by all accounts, he was a kind and even noble soul who died a hero’s death when the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic one hundred years ago today.  A graduate of Sewanee’s class of 1885, he was apparently the picture of Southern chivalry at the time of the ship’s sinking.  It was reported shortly afterward that, when one man tried to make his way into a lifeboat, Butt pulled him back and said, “Sorry. Women will be attended to first or I’ll break every damned bone in your body.”  His reputation among Titanic buffs has grown apace over the years.

After graduating from Sewanee, Butt joined the army and ended up serving as chief military aide to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.  It was at the Major’s suggestion, in fact, that Taft came in 1911 to Sewanee to deliver a wide-ranging speech from a make-shift podium erected in front of All Saint’s Chapel.  The image above is from a set of stained-glass windows on University history in the chapel vestibule, only a few feet from where the President and his aide stood that day.  I will admit to experiencing a slight vicarious thrill when I look at it, as though somehow the vivid colors of the window associate me in some way with the particulars of their story.

I have seen a black-and-white photograph of that event, which I hope sometime to scan and upload.  In it, Taft is speaking, and he is ebullient in the way of all politicians.  Behind the President, Butt is harder to make out.  Before them is a sea of umbrellas.  Here and there you can make out undergraduate faces straining to hear Taft’s speech in the rain.  It has occurred to me that many of these young men will go on in the next few years to fight in the First World War and not return.  The Sewanee Memorial Cross which looks out from a bluff into the valley below was erected in honor of their collective sacrifice.

But all of that is in those young men’s futures.  In Archie Butt’s future, of course, is the Titanic and the iceberg.  His name, one posthumous tribute observed, “once synonymous of laughter and jest, now symbolic of heroism, was repeated while eyes blurred and voices became queerly strained.”  Also aboard the Titantic on that fateful voyage was Francis Millet, the artist twenty years Butt’s senior with whom he shared a house in Washington.  He may have been Butt’s lover, although this is only speculation.  In Washington, not far from the White House, is the Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain, erected privately, “with the sanction of Congress” as the inscription says, to commemorate their friendship and tragic deaths.

Whatever the nature of their attachment, it is clear that Butt and Millet were close.  Millet was himself also a significant figure in his day, and many of his paintings and large-scale murals still are to be found in American buildings.  The image to the left is from a series in the Federal Courthouse in Cleveland, originally created for the Post Office, that depict scenes of postal delivery.  Its title is  “Foreign Mail Transfer, New York Harbor,” and was completed in 1911.  The paint on it was hardly dry when Millet boarded the Titanic, together with Butt, headed for New York but never to arrive.

In thinking about such weighty events, I am often inclined to draw a literary connection, as some of you may know.  There was, in the days that followed the loss of the ship, an outpouring of  poetry about the Titanic’s larger meaning, most of it execrable.  Thomas Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain,” on the other hand, is a profound (and not atypical) meditation on the operation of Fate.  It is worth reading in full, but one stanza in particular stands out for me:

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

It is a hundred years later.  Global warming has loosed more ice from its Arctic network, though travel is more fraught with fear of disaster of human rather than natural origin.  If yours was a gay relationship with Francis Millet, Major Butt, you would find the political discourse on the subject more open and yet more vexed now than it had been in your day.  Earlier this year, an Italian liner ran aground, and you would be amazed to know her captain was among the first to abandon ship.  But perhaps it would please you to know that, at Commencement each spring, Sewanee students and professors walk over the spot where you stood faithfully alongside President Taft so long ago.  A century from now, I wonder, who of us will be remembered as you are now, courageous in the face of unspeakable horror?

Posted in Military, Nautical, Poetry, Sewanee | 2 Comments

Argus’ Tale

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Uncomely and Broken

Sometimes when I’m teaching Homer’s Odyssey, I ask students to write a short story about a passage they’ve read but from the perspective of a character other than Odysseus.  I decided to try my own hand at the assignment.  It’s based on an episode from Book 17, when Odysseus, now back home in Ithaca, comes to his palace disguised as an old beggar.  A grim fact of Odysseus’ return has been the failure of almost everybody to recognize him without being told; only his old dog, Argus, knows him for who he is (a translation of the original passage is below my story). It’s a classic tale of canine loyalty, but my idea was to complicate it a little.

Argus’ Tale

There was a time … well, I think there was a time, because I can’t remember all that well any more.  But there was a time when I had an excellent nose.  I could track anything– stags, birds, you name it, I’d get the smell and I was after it.  And I’d catch it, too!  I would.  You laugh, but I would, because I was fast.  Look at him go, the hunters would say when I tore after some boar or other, and my master would smile and say, Oh yeah, he’s fast alright.  That’s what he’d say.

Those days are over, though.  My nose isn’t what it was, and my legs are, well, let’s say that I just don’t get around that much anymore.  And my master has been gone for a long time, too.

I usually lie here, outside the palace.  There are always a lot of people going in and out of the palace, and they always have some small treat for me.  It works out well.  I lie here and, when I see them, I struggle to my feet and give the old tail a wag, and  they give things to eat.  They seem to have a lot left over every night. … There was a time when the servants would bring me the juiciest pieces of the prey I had hunted down.  I was the king’s dog, and I ate better than most of the people in the house.  Why shouldn’t I have?  I’d caught it, hadn’t I?

Well, that was a long time ago.  I don’t know, lying here’s a lot easier than running after things.  I was fast once, you know … maybe I already told you?  I can’t recall.

Did I mention that I used to have a really good nose?  Oh, I could tell you who everyone was even if I’d only sniffed them once.  My master had some many friends who would come, and I knew right away who was who.  Their clothes might smell of salt, and I knew they had come straight off from the sea.  And maybe their sandals were made of leather from a kind of cow that you don’t find around here.  I could smell all of that, and I’d know.

I can’t smell anything now, though.  And it hardly matters.  The men going in and coming out of the palace, I can’t even tell how many of them there are, maybe a hundred, maybe more.  When they pass by, I make a big show out of getting up, and I wag my tail and that’s usually enough to get a little snack.

Anyway, here comes one.  Just try to stand up here.  Okay.  I don’t think I recognize this one.  Or maybe I do?  Wish I still had the nose–it would be useful to know if I knew him sometime ago.  Seems friendly.  Let’s hope he’s got something for me to eat.

 

From Odyssey, Book 17

 The translation of Odyssey 17 below is from an on-line translation by Ian Johnson:

And so these two men [Odysseus and Eumaeus]                               [290]
talked to each other about these things.  Then a dog
lying there raised its head and pricked up its ears.
It was Argus, brave Odysseus’ hunting dog,
whom he himself had raised many years ago.
But before he could enjoy being with his dog,
he left for sacred Troy.  In earlier days, young men
would take the dog to hunt wild goats, deer, and rabbits,                   380
but now, with his master gone, he lay neglected
in the piles of dung left there by mules and cattle,
heaped up before the doors until Odysseus’ servants
took it as manure for some large field.  Argus lay there,                             [300]
covered in fleas.  Then, when he saw Odysseus,
who was coming closer, Argus wagged his tail
and dropped his ears.  But he no longer had the strength
to approach his master.  Odysseus looked away
and brushed aside a tear—he did so casually 
to hide it from Eumaeus.  Then he questioned him:                           390

“Eumaeus, it’s strange this dog is lying here,
in the dung.  He has a handsome body.
I’m not sure if his speed once matched his looks
or if he’s like those table dogs men have,
ones their masters raise and keep for show.”                                    [310]

Then, swineherd Eumaeus, you answered him and said:

“Yes, this dog belongs to a man who died
somewhere far away.  If he had the form
and acted as he did when Odysseus
left him and went to Troy, you’d quickly see                             400
his speed and strength, and then you’d be amazed.
No wild animal he chased escaped him
in deep thick woods, and he could track a scent.
He’s in a bad way now.  His master’s dead
in some foreign land, and careless women
don’t look after him.  For when their masters                                   [320]
no longer exercise their power, then slaves
have no desire to do their proper work.
Far-seeing Zeus takes half the value of a man
the day he’s taken and becomes a slave.”                                  410

This said, Eumaeus went inside the stately palace,
going straight into the hall to join the noble suitors.
But once he’d seen Odysseus after nineteen years,
the dark finality of death at once seized Argus.

Posted in Classics, Dogs, Education, Poetry | Leave a comment

Studying the Free Market at Harvard

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Uncomely and Broken

It was September 1979 and the school guidance counselor wanted to set up an interview for me and my friend Mike with some guys starting up a concession business at Harvard Stadium.  Hot dogs, popcorn, that sort of thing.  Would we be interested?  We looked at each other.  “What’s it pay?” Mike asked.  Mike was type of guy who liked to know up-front about money.  This was a trait I would come to admire in him over the next few months.  The guidance counselor hadn’t thought to ask about the pay.  We decided to check it out anyway.

It made sense that we had been sought out for the Harvard job.  Mike and I had both worked as vendors at Fenway Park for the past two summers, so we knew about selling food and handling cash at large sporting events.  We were both sophomores at Latin—Boston Latin School, founded in 1635, the oldest public school in the nation, alma mater to Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and countless other cultural luminaries.  I suspect that our connection to Latin meant more than our experience at Fenway to our would-be Harvard employers.  To have Latin School boys peddling their wares at ye olde Harvard Stadium seemed traditional somehow.  Classy, even.

Mike and I showed up in Cambridge a week later, an hour before kick-off, as we’d been instructed.  The guys running this operation, it was clear, were new to concessions.  We were the only vendors they’d hired, and there were no cooks or tray-setters. It was just the two of us and the two of them.  We helped them get the dogs cooked, the popcorn popped, the cokes chilled, and all of it loaded into trays, but it was a pretty last-minute job.  They had hats, I think, but that was about all they had for us by way of uniform.  Just before the game started, they began to run us through the price-list they’d worked up.

“Okay, boys,” the first guy said. “The hot dogs are fifty cents.”

“Do you have buttons?” Mike asked.

“What kind of buttons?” the guy responded.

At Fenway, you had to wear a big button indicating the price of the thing you were selling.  In a large and loud crowd, it made it easier when people asked, How much?  Instead of yelling, you just pointed to the button.

The Harvard guys didn’t have any buttons.  Mike said out of the corner of his mouth, “McDonough, dogs are a buck now.”  We went through the rest of the list with the guys, and after each one, Mike would say, “McDonough,” and he would double the price.  By the end of the drill, he was just giving me a knowing look.

Harvard Stadium was an easier place to sell concessions than Fenway, where the bosses were constantly patrolling the park to make sure people were working.  These guys were too busy in the booth outside trying to keep up with cooking and pouring drinks.  They had no idea how much we were charging in the stadium.  When we were done selling one tray, we would return, give them the amount they were expecting, and help them load up the next tray.  Then off we’d go through a side-entrance to the stadium, waved through by the security guards, who were all very friendly.

In fact, everybody was friendly.  The people who came out to see Harvard play on Sunday afternoons, I discovered, were nowhere near as unruly as Red Sox fans were.  They never complained about our overpriced hot-dogs or Cokes.  I started to feel a little bad about ripping them off, but Mike’s heart was hard.  “Ah, fuck ‘em,” he’d say. “Nobody’s forcing them to buy anything.”

A few weeks later, Mike took me aside just as we were going back to re-load our trays.  “You know what this guy just told me?” he asked, nodding his head toward the security guard.  “These are all general admission seats.”  So what?  “So what?!  It means that all you gotta do is show your stub to the guy and he lets you in.  There’s no assigned seat.  Nobody’s gonna yell at you for where you’re sitting.”

He showed me a ticket stub he had in his hand, and indeed, it did say General Admission.  When I pointed out that we weren’t here to watch the game, he rolled his eyes.  “McDonough, McDonough, McDonough,” he sighed in exasperation.  “Come with me.”

We walked past our hapless bosses at the concession booth, over to the vicinity of the ticket office.  Mike accosted someone standing in line.  Tickets were eight bucks, but Mike offered to sell him the stub for four.  In a matter of seconds, the deal was done, and Mike was four dollars richer.

As we made our way back into the stadium, I asked him where he had gotten the stub. “I traded a dog to somebody for it,” he said, smiling.  “Not bad, huh?  Eight hundred percent mark-up.”  We had been studying economics at school, but it had not occurred to me that our lessons might have some practical application.

By the time Mike had stumbled on his stubs-for-dogs racket, there was only one game left in the season, so we never really had a chance to test the boundaries of this unfettered free market.  And although the prospects for profit were bright, neither of us went back to the Stadium the next year.  By that time, we were juniors, which meant we could work night-games at Fenway selling beer.  “There’s better money selling beer to drunks,” Mike told me.  I was certain that he knew what he was talking about.

Posted in Boston, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Protected: Strip-Searches, Ancient and Modern

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Uncomely and Broken

This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Posted in Classics, Emblems, Numismatics, Uncategorized | Enter your password to view comments.