That order seemed to apply now, in reverse, to my own linguistic progress. Psalms’ syllables with Packard stats, English now shrank to seeming oddly simpler. If it was plain Monopoly, Latin felt like contract bridge. Bid and nuance, you needed to recall your own most recent cunning move. Asked to translate in class, I saw how one full page of English yielded a mere half-page of Latin. This concision, so like the distillation of great poets, seemed as close as I would ever come to being a real artist. I recalled, with surprising fondness, my mother’s vanity tabletop, its litter of old family photos and half-full perfume bottles. Once, holding a tiny costly vial of amber under my nose, Grace smiled her full-frontal charm: “Meadows, somehow they fit two whole acres of wildflowers in here!”

I lived busy with reduction and detection, still in pursuit of Dad’s gate-opening greeting for his ghosty Redeemer wearing robes. By my third year, I had the Hebrew. I even had its idiomatic Rabbinic form. I now knew the exact pronunciation for teaching Clyde the face-saving greeting his Saviour would best know, most love:

I belong to you, O Lord, sir.

Clyde had been my founder. But by the time I left school my teacher, the Headmaster’s young wife, was his cosponsor—I mean my own. And they both might have said of my young mind what Augustus stated about Rome itself:

“I inherited a village of brick. I left it a city of marble.”

IV.

I was in Washington to attend a Smithsonian preview. The exhibit offered certain wonderful artifacts from Monticello. Some Jeffersonia from my old school’s collection would be shown—his handwritten garden ledger for three seasons’ vegetables. My first suave roommate, now a chain-smoking actor, was staying with people he knew. They owned a revamped townhouse in Adams-Morgan and, heading to meet him for the opening, I decided to stroll over early.

Wearing my blue blazer and usual dull-gray slacks, I soon wondered about my safety on this street. I passed rough, then worse-looking beggars, latent cutpurses all asking me for two dollars or more. Three weeks earlier, a young white government worker had left a local Jeep dealership in his red Cherokee. The vehicle was so new, stickers yet gummed its back window. At a stopsign, two armed kids jumped in. The carjacking was discovered only when the owner’s body was found burned in a weedy field out past Alexandria. Street names began to sound more happily familiar as I struck a brisker pace toward the house where my pal stayed. I felt followed, edgy.

My memory was not what it’d been (even though I’d then edged only just past forty). I found I had left the written address back at my hotel. No problem. Either 316 or 306. I’d check both. At 316, as I bent to peruse the names beside the buzzers, Event and Sensation overlapped. Like the moment of Dad’s Packard’s crash when a road sign predicting a deer then offered three of them and let me see my father’s racial history in an illuminating bash that adrenaline briefly loaned, today I received this sequence: