Mister Argh

You could, if you wanted to, live here, where I live, in this community, blissfully ignorant of what goes on anywhere else. One of my high school history teachers compared the Village of Knotydart to a cocoon. That same history teacher wore leather boots, blue jeans, and a jean jacket to class nearly every day of the week. He tossed the word “groovy” around quite a bit. When we studied the Roman Empire, he rolled a TV with a VCR into the classroom and showed us Jesus Christ Superstar. That was his first year, when he did all of that. He’d moved back to Knotydart from Tinseltown. He’d given up on the pipe dream of becoming the next Frances Ford Coppola. (Incidentally, he studied screenwriting with StepDude at Tinseltown College, but that was many moons ago.) After Mister Argh’s first year of teaching at Knotydart High, he started wearing khaki pants and a professor’s elbow-padded wool sport jacket, a button down shirt, and a tie. He traded his boots for brown oxfords. He shaved off his thick black beard, and I never heard him say, “groovy,” again. Over the next two years he worked off his beer belly. He married an English teacher, and they had a kid. One day, by chance, like a year after I’d graduated college, he led his family into the bookstore café I kinda-sorta managed. He and his wife smiled at me. They didn’t say hi, though, and they never came back—at least not when I was around. No surprise there. I was a lousy student. 

20 March 2007