Greek love
Historian Frank Frost captured my heart but not the object of his affections.

BY HANK HYENA
"Mom!" I yammered happily into the phone. "I've got a favorite professor!"

"Oh, really? What's he teach?"

"Ancient history. We're studying the Greeks now -- the Age of Pericles ... He's like a rock star, Mom!"

"Pericles?"

"No, no, my professor. His lectures are cathartic! His answers Homeric! His slide shows Olympian! He infuses Alcibiades with hubris ..."

"Professor Alcibiades?"

"No! My professor's name is Frank Frost!"

"What? What did you say?"

I was a pretentious 18-year-old, checking in with my parents/tuition donors after my first two weeks of classes at UC-Santa Barbara.

Dad wasn't available when I made the call, because he was in the barn pitching alfalfa to the Holsteins. I'm from a third-generation dairy farm family, but bovine lactation never captured my interest.

"Animal husbandry won't be your major?" Dad frowned when I mailed the forms. "How about veterinary medicine? Or ag econ? You could study ichthyology -- your uncle Clyde's made a bundle in trout."

"Classics," I sniffed. "Hellenism will be my forte."

Dad rolled his eyes. He stared at his boots, worrying, "Oh, no -- Greeks? Hank Jr. must be a homo."

"Frank ... Frost." I reiterated my professor's name, with exaggerated patience, to my mother.

"Goodness gracious!" she blurted. "In high school I knew a Frank Frost. Maybe it's him?"

"No way!" I snorted. "You don't get it; he's not like you -- you don't understand!"

Frank Frost was everything my parents were not -- sophisticated, cultured, decadent. He probably knew six dead languages and 35 pagan fertility rituals. Frank was groovy! His summers were spent sailing twixt the Cyclades, scuba diving through Doric columns of sunken civilizations.

Meanwhile, my parents were yanking udders, whitewashing fences and shoveling manure.

"You're wrong, Mom. Sorry! There's a big world out there -- you just don't know this guy."

I hung up the phone and returned to my studies. The Peloponnesian War had begun -- an armada of triremes was rowing to Sicily.

When Dr. Frost asked questions, my arm shot up. My responses were Demosthenic in passion, Socratic in shrewdness. I nailed quizzes, aced midterms, I was headed for a easy A-plus.

In other courses, my aptitude was truant -- D's in Latin, C's in Anthropology and Literature. Only in Frank Frost's amphitheater did my cerebrum spin true. I felt psychically connected to him -- I imagined us in togas, exchanging epigrams.

One morning (after a particularly compelling lecture on Alexander's siege of Tyre) I trailed Dr. Frost into his office. I had a question about catapult strategy, but when I opened my mouth, something entirely different came out:

"Do you know anybody named Elizabeth Johnson?"

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Cupid's cruel arrow