The Ides of Blog.

Caes: (To the Soothsayer) “The ides of March are come.”

Sooth: “Ay, Caesar; but not gone.”

— Julius Caesar, Act III, scene i.

Today Mrs. Quarles comes to mind. I learned Latin from her for a few years at Alamo Heights High School. A Henna-headed eccentric, a woman who had traveled a lot, and someone with a tart sense of humor, I remember her better than most of my teachers. Not so much for the Latin language; only fragments of that remain. She was never short on stories about Rome and the Romans — those I remember.

Last I heard, she was still alive, though she would be quite elderly indeed by now. In 1999, I dug up her address and sent her a copy of a magazine I had edited. I’d managed to work some Latin into one of the illustrations for one of the articles: the first lines of Caesar’s Gallic Commentaries. I had learned them in her class. I did not hear back from her.

Every day, Mrs. Quarles would write the date in Latin on the chalkboard — the kalends, nones and ides system. I still remember how to reckon that too, a remarkably useless skill. (A man without any useless skills is going to live a drab life, I’m certain.) On every March 15, she would write the Latin date using black chalk, which as far as I remember she never used on any other day. “Today,” she explained, “is the day Caesar died.”

Today, in AD 2003, is the day I got a real cast for my leg. Went in to see my substitute doc this morning. He looked at my x-ray and said, “So you broke it!” He seemed in a better humor today. Less tired, I figure. He proceeded to put on a cast, but the heel he used was so tall it would have caused me another spill, so he took that one off using a scary-looking tool (a “cast cutter” according to the label), and then built a better one.

Today also happened to be the warmest day in months. Yuriko, Lilly and Ann went to a nearby park, and some other places, while I stayed on the couch and watched “True Grit.” An excellent movie. I was inspired to watch it because, when my brother Jay was visiting last December, he mentioned a line Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall) says to Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne). Marshal Cogburn, though hopelessly outnumbered, demands that Pepper surrender, who answers: “That’s mighty tall talk for a one-eyed fat man.”