Mrs. Zeller c. 1962

About the time I was old enough

to get my license I knew that an

old farm house you entered via

a mud room, even though it was

summer, was going to be as cold

as a witch’s teat come winter.

Mrs. Zeller’s house, right on

the circle in Dumbarton, was

one of these un-insulated wood

frame buildings.

Already past retirement age when she

taught me French, I remember all her

classroom pets were girls who repaid

her by cheating unmercifully.  On cold

winter afternoons, Jonathan Sink who

sat in the back of the class could make

a sound just like the wind whistling

through drafty windows, and her hearing,

not being what it had once been,

she couldn’t pick out this impish boy,

although we could all see her trying.

Mrs. Zeller was tall with white

hair and she wore glasses that I realize

now foreshadowed Dame Edna.

She was domineering and faculty

and students all gave her a wide berth.

For a month that summer, Billy

Whipple and I were tutored three times

a week at her house.  It wasn’t my idea

nor Billy’s. It was, I’m sure, her idea. 

She needed a few more students to make

a class of nine or so, and we were her

victims because we weren’t up to speed

for the torture she planned for her up

coming French-three class.

Mrs. Zeller would be pleased that I

ended up thirty years later working with

some French Aerospatiale engineers who

were more than happy to help me with the

language so long as I used graphic turns

of scatological, sexual or sodomical phrases.

I don’t remember much of our sessions,

but I do remember Mr. Zeller racing

through the living room in a plaid,

long sleeve shirt on his way to put on

the record Telstar, which believe it or not

was at the beginning of the British music

invasion.

I knew of Telstar, of course, the first

time TV pictures had been beamed

“across the pond” by satellite.  I had

actually seen a black and white film

in the gym of the first transmission. 

A line of techno-stiffs sitting in folding

chairs, were introduced with dead-pan,

scientific reverence.  But one guy

on the end made a surreptitious

wave when the camera moved from

him.  That little wave I think now

was the butterfly in Japan flapping

its wings that would cause a Tsunami

of follow-your-bliss in the US . . .

but who knew of such things then.

With the unearthly clavioline notes

droning away, Mrs. Zeller looked

at Billy and me with hooded eyes that

darted sideways, back and forth.  Her

full lips seemed chewing on some

pulpy French verb when she got up

and went into the room that Mr. Zeller

had disappeared into, and stopped the

Telstarical music once and for all.

I remember this now because

this week another craft Voyager I

is on the verge of leaving the solar

system after thirty-five years of

space flight, and it dawned on me

that I was alive when the moon was

earth’s only satellite. 

Sputnik, Explorer, Telstar . . . we don’t

even bother to name satellites anymore,

and there’s so much junk up there now

I’m glad Voyager 1 left when it did

or it might have ricocheted like a pin-ball

on leaving earth to who knows where.

I’m glad I remember Mrs. Zeller, too,

for memory is the only safe place to be

as we travel out into the silent vault of

cold space . . . to who knows where.

FG  December 12, 2012

All rights reserved by the author Forrest Greenwood