Return of the prodigal son, part II

Found my way to my old high school, the Amerian Overseas School of Rome. As the bus travelled down the old familiar road my heart started beating faster and harder, a strange sign of a strange nervousness. Spoke my way through the security guard and up to my old math class room, which is now a computer lab. A student pointed me to the math classroom on the other side of the hallway, and i spoke to my old math teach, Mrs. Fiochi, who didn't remember me but did say that my eyes, no, the look in my eyes, was very familiar and unique. She said the same thing 12 years ago, and couldn't say much more this time since class was starting.

Walked up the villa (my school consists of a number of modern school-type buildings and an old villa in the middle, housing offices in the first floors and classrooms in the upper floors, as well as a large soccer field on one side (contrary to runour, it wasn't sold off)) to my Italian classroom as i knew Mrs. Levine wouldn't mind me waling in on her class. Sure enough, she was giving her advanced French students a test on the last day, last period before the break, but she welcomed me in and talked with me at length. The students were very talkative during their test, at which Mrs. Levine would look up every now and then and say, "students, be quiet, this is Francisco, an old student, and i'm trying to talk with him. One day you too will return after ten years." You had to know her and her unique pedagogical techniques.

I was surprised that she remembered where we used to sit during class, and was most delightfully surprised to hear she remembered a unique stunt (hack?) pulled at our school: someone took salt and wrote the words "FUCK ED" (Ed Tatko being the principle at the time) in large letters in the field (salt kills plants, in this case killing the grass in the shape of the letters for a number of days, weeks after the stunt was pulled, and the words were quite beautifully visible from the top of the villa). Levine remembered our class b/c of that stunt, and related the tale to her class, though in her memory the letters were the size of the soccer field (a notion i almost scoffed at since writing letters that big would have required a little more skill than i give the possible culprits credit for). I hear that stunt was one of the main causes of his nervous breakdown, and he left the school after only 1.5 years.

Levine walked me down to the offices where i met some of the new staff, including the Spanish instructor (they now offer up to AP/IB Spanish), who happened to be friends with the mother of a high school friend of mine, Maudy Tuseth, who used to live in New York but moved back to Rome just over a year ago. Through Maudy's mother i got Maudy's number, quite a treat, of which i'll talk more later.