Promts; pinky sugar, fields of oats, a tweed suit and a straw hat
Frank Wesley was old school, or maybe just old. The old school hadn’t been good to him. Professors wore tweed, his herringbone was from the fifties and I think a London fog. No one had a lot of questions in his class and it wasn’t because questions weren’t encouraged and it wasn’t because there wasn’t anything to ask about, it’s that he wouldn’t respond to Professor, he’d look over his shoulder at Doctor Wesley and he’d frown at Frank.
We took a field trip late one spring, not the sort of thing you normally did in psyche 431; deviancy. We followed like ducklings behind him. He wore a straw hat, the riot of white hair blew around the rim and stuck out the holes in the top. We didn’t go far, just through the park blocks. The evangelists were setting up on the commons. Every weekday at lunch time they’d shout out through an old peavey PA about five minutes of fire and brimstone and then field fifty five minutes of heckling. On nice spring days people would take their lunch in the commons to watch the show.
Frank paused and made a decision to move on. Half a block north he saw what he was looking for; a grizzled old man with a bottle in a wrinkled bag, who, when he noticed us, Frank, took off his hat and held it out and was about to say something.
“You have any spare change?” Frank asked in his patois of Eastern/Bloc and Yiddish.
The man was non plussed.
Frank rolled back the threadbare sleeve of his tweed jacket. There was a long number tattooed in blue across his wrist.
“Four years in Dachau,” he said “I was 16.”
The man worked his jaw but no sound came out.
“I need to feed my children,” he gestured at us “anything you could spare would help”
The man rubbed the stubble on his chin, got his land legs under him “Fuck off” and staggered off down the park blocks.
Frank marched us back to the classroom.
“Any questions?”
There was a lot of head scratching.
“Wesley?”
“Is that a question?”
“Yes.”
“Ellis Island. Anything else?”
I smiled. People were taking notes.
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