Rain; Eyak; "The Art Teacher"

It's raining. A very subtle rain, but rain none the less. All I can hear is an occasional plop on the window air conditioner. And that swish-swish sound when a car goes by. But now I think the rain has stopped. Maybe it will come again later in the eve.

It rained at lunchtime also. I sat in the corner of the deli against the mirrored wall reading an article in "The New Yorker" and glancing out the windows now and then. Rain would glide down the plaid awnings, stop for a second to form a tiny watery bubble at the edge then splash onto the pavement below.

"As in many Native American languages, both prefixes and suffixes can be added to verbs, resulting in forms that make distinctions not just in tense -- did an action happen in the past or in the present? -- but also in the degree to which an action has been completed, whether it occurs regularly, what part of the body is affected, and whether it is being done sincerely. Thus, in Eyak, the question "Are you going to keep tickling me in the face in the same spot repeatedly?" is rendered as one word, xuqul’iilxaaxcch’kks’h."

The x characters actually have a tiny dot under them, but I spend about an hour trying to find the right coding to indicate that special chracter. A futile effort. This is a toic that is far more complex than I imagined.

With the death of these two individuals, the language will vanish save for academic study.

"The Art Teacher"

There I was in uniform
Looking at the art teacher
I was just a girl then;
Never have I loved since then

He was not that much older than I was
He had taken our class to the Metropolitan Museum
He asked us what our favorite work of art was,
But never could I tell it was him
Oh, I wish I could tell him --
Oh, I wish I could have told him

I looked at the Rubens and Rembrandts
I liked the John Singer Sargents
He told me he liked Turner
Never have I turned since then
No, never have I turned to any other man

All this having been said,
I married an executive company head
All this having been done, a Turner - I own one
Here I am in this uniformish, pant-suit sort of thing,
Thinking of the art teacher
I was just a girl then;
Never have I loved since then
No, never have I loved any other man.

PAX!