My Forgotten Love of the Matriarch of the Nerds - 6/22/2007 in 2005 - 2007: High School

Here is an interesting figure from my past: Emily Sophrona.

Mrs. Sophrona was a Latin teacher at the middle school I went to. She was maybe fifty-five or sixty years old. She was a witty, bitter, sarcastic woman who said everything very abruptly. She was very funny and very well liked, even though she was not a particularly good teacher. Her clothes were always ill-fitting, old fasioned and ugly. She had braces.

I was in love with her. That is the only way to describe how I felt about Emily Sophrona. I worshipped the ground she walked on. I gathered little facts about her and compulsively organized them in my mind. I clung to the idea of her as something absolutely sacred within the chaos and confusion that was Flannigan Middle School. Her classroom, a secluded little Latin haven on the outskirts of the school, was to me then what the band room is to me now. I have no idea why.

I fell in love with her when I had her for three months during the sixth grade foreign language exploratory program. She is the reason that I fought with my parents so hard and so persistantly over the right to choose Latin as the language I would take for the rest of my school career. It didn't work. They insisted on a living language. I took French, and hated it, and took out my bitterness on a seven-years-younger Madame Bellakanovski, who never understood what she'd done wrong.

But all hope was not lost! In seventh grade, I found out that I was eligible to try out for the school's academic decathalon team, and that Mrs. Sophrona was the advisor for said academic decathalon team. So I tried out, and I got in, and once or twice a month I got to skip school for the entire day and hang out with fifteen nerds and Emily Sophrona, matriarch of the nerds. I thought of these people as my family for a long time. Some familiar names from my nerd family: Tom Rousseau. Ivy Fletcher. Molly O'Connell. David Garret. (He was most definitely David back then. Funny, isn't it?) I didn't know them very well at the time, but they were all there. And you know what? In competition, I outshone them all. By the time I got to the eighth grade and people like Jai Nahn had graduated, I was clearly the number-one star nerd. Emily Sophrona rearranged her batting order around me. She put me in strategic places. She smirked at the advisor of the other team every time I took the stage.

And in eighth grade, Emily Sophrona agreed to privately tutor me in Latin. Every Friday afternoon I sat in her secluded little Latin haven on the outskirts of the school for an hour and a half and she taught me Latin. And also we just hung out. When I would come in, before we started with the Latin, we would spend maybe half an hour complaining about dumb people and laughing. It never occured to me that there was any better way to spend Friday afternoons. I always left beaming.

Here is one thing that she told me when we were just hanging out:

"Never go into teaching Aidan," she told me. "Just don't do it. It's not worth it." My father tells me the same thing whenever my mother isn't around.

I would visit Mrs. Sophrona all the time if I could. I used to. But she's a vice principal now in some other town. She never even told me which one.

This is only vaguely relevant. I just thought of it when I was lying awake a few hours ago trying to thoroughly review, one by one, all the times I've been in love. I had decided, mostly because it was one in the morning, that I had to undertake this project as part of the larger project of trying to make things make sense. I feel like if you can make love make sense you can probably make a lot of other things make sense too.

I'd just forgotten about Mrs. Sophrona, that's all. I'd forgotten about the different kinds of love from the kind you normally think about. Those are important too.