GREEK LOVE | PAGE 1, 2
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My mentor's eyes lit up, like a lustful Zeus. "She's your mother," he guessed.

"Yeah," I said, blushing. My eyes wetted with mysterious emotion.

An awkward, sheepish grin spread across his face. I wanted him to say my mother was beautiful when she was young, I wanted him to say something nice about a girl I'd never know, but all he said was:

"What are you here for?"

"I -- I forget," I replied. "I had a question, but I forget."

I telephoned my mother that night to pester her for details.

"Frank was very ... intelligent." She answered, warily.

"You dated him, didn't you!?" I screeched. "Did you kiss him?"

"Ha ha hee hee ha ha!" She chirped an adolescent, embarrassed giggle that I'd never heard before.

"I'm ... not sure," she said. "Ask your grandmother."

The matriarch of my mother's clan has an elephant's memory; every family incident is archived meticulously in her tiny gray head. I telephoned her at the wisteria-cloaked house where she's lived for 81 years.

"Frank Frost?" she snapped. "What a pest! Always underfoot, seeking your mother's attention. We couldn't get rid of him!"

"He's a great man!" I argued. "Why wasn't my mother in love with him?"

"She dated popular boys at school. There was something eccentric about Frank."

Gramma cruelly recounted the courting behavior of my favorite professor. He was "clumsy but aggressive," she said. He snuck into their house and left notes under my mother's pillow, and he gave her a "dirty book" to read. He trailed them on their vacations -- camping outside in a sleeping bag so he could see my indifferent mother in the morning.

Subtle hints to abandon the chase were ignored. Tempers flared -- finally, my Gramma told him he was never ever allowed to visit their house again.

"I was so glad to be rid of him!" she hissed. "I'm so relieved your mother married a reasonable man like your father."

My father, I mourned. My father who tried to interest me in plumbing, welding and heifer insemination. My father who thinks I'm a freak.

If Frank had been my father I'd have a patron and a pal -- someone to harangue about Herodotus, someone to praise Pindar and elucidate Euripides.

I never talked to Frank Frost again, but he remains my favorite professor. A riveting speaker, he injected sexy enthusiasm into his antiquarian topics.

My ineptitude in Latin ruined my dreams of a classics career. After graduation, I floundered in myriad jobs for a decade. I had rebelled against my father's occupation without developing a substitute.

Eventually, I stumbled onto performance art. Onstage I recite droll tragic epics with huge slides illustrating the action. My tone is Dionysian, my structure Apollonian -- some people say I'm "original" but I know I'm not. I'm just mimicking the lectures of Dr. Frank Frost, the lost patriarch of my imagination.
SALON | Feb. 12, 1999

Hank Hyena is a columnist for SF Gate, living in San Francisco.

More teachers we loved:
+ Remembrance of things present By Carol Lloyd
+ The vocabulary of wonder By Scott Rosenberg
+ Teaching by daydream By Chris Colin
+ Radical redhead Miss Smith By Jenn Shreve
+ One valentine too late By Karen Templer
+ My Latin love affair By Andrew Leonard
+ The warlock of grammar By Fiona Morgan

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