The Wednesday Wars: March–April

He brandished it in the air, like Julius Caesar himself.

When Julius Caesar is coming into Rome — which is a place where very bad things will happen to him — this soothsayer comes up to him to tell him what’s going to happen.

“Bobby Kennedy will end the war, end the discrimination that’s splitting our country in two, and end the control of the government by a handful of fat old men.”

It was hard every night hearing President Johnson and all of his generals with medals spread over their chests say how well the war was going and how the enemy was about to give up, and then having CBS News cut to pictures of soldiers who were wading through rice paddies and holding their rifles high above the water, or who were carrying out a buddy whose face was covered with dried blood, or who were huddled in holes and covering their heads as the mortars came over in Khesanh.

“Let’s start with your stance,” she said. “Let’s lean you forward a little bit, so that you can always be moving into the next stride, instead of holding yourself back on each stride.

“Let’s hope we both emerge unscathed.” Which, in case you missed it, was the teacher strategy again to make me look up the word “unscathed.”

“Mr. Hoodhood,” she said, “I have not taught you the plays of William Shakespeare for the last five months for you to demean them by acting as though they were all about people stabbing each other.”

It was Sycorax and Caliban who plummeted onto Mrs. Sidman’s lap.

And it might be that some coaches somewhere would delay a tryout on an afternoon when some of the tryoutees have just been traumatized by two gigantic rats falling out of their classroom ceiling.

“It will be called,” Mrs. Baker told us, “Operation Pegasus. Now, someone tell me the meaning of the classical allusion.”

Walter Cronkite carried the announcement the last day of March: President Johnson said that he did not want to be distracted by partisan politics “with America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home.”

And you learn the telltale signs of someone ahead of you who is about to spit off to the side.

By the time noon came, my hands were blue with the fresh ditto ink, but I had finished every nonrestrictive-clause exercise, and done the reading comprehension, and even done more to make the California Gold Rush relevant to You by pointing out the perils of the love of money in a brilliantly worded argument for Mr. Petrelli, which I handed Mrs. Baker while everyone went out to lunch recess.

We went berserk. Even Coach Quatrini went berserk — jumping up and down on the sidelines just like one of the little Hupfers.

Coach Quatrini was going berserk again, and seemed to be trying to levitate himself off the ground.