Winter Moon of the Winter Solstice
How’s this for irony? My Latin tutor, Greg, and I conduct our sessions on the phone. Have done for three years now. Yesterday I had read out a line from the Loeb translation of a sentence we were having trouble with and I waited. Nothing. That had happened before so I hung up and called him again. His phone picked up. I spoke. Nothing.
Well, then, he called me on my cell phone. The landline works better for an hour or so of tutoring, so we usually use it. I answered. I spoke. Nothing. We traded attempts back and forth until Greg sent me an e-mail. Was my phone on mute? No, I e-mailed him back. Weird.
We continued for a while, then we decided to scrap the session and move into January. He e-mailed me later and said that both his and Ana’s phone had had the same problem. AT&T.
Anyhow this tickled my funny bone. Trying to learn how to communicate with a long dead poet in his own language, two of us, speaking a common language, couldn’t communicate because the technology prevented it. When we switched to e-mail, on which we could communicate, we could not use it for continuing our communication focused on Ovid.