One autumn afternoon in the mid-seventies,
when the two realms of Christian time
were still being referred to as BC and AD,
a student of mine raised her hand.
She had found an error in our textbook.
“The dates of Plato are messed up,” she said.
“How could he be born in 428 then die in 327?
What, was he going backwards?”
“I suppose you could say that everyone
born before Christ was, in a sense,
going backward in time without knowing it,” I said.
Then from the back of the room was heard,
“So did they all start going forward at Christmas?!”
There are moments in a teacher’s life
when a discussion has gotten interestingly
out of control and it’s time for the allegorical
figure of Reason to enter the stadium
on her docile horse, festooned with facts and numbers.
So while some students joked about the ancients
in their tunics getting younger by the year,
I drew a long horizontal line on the board
to represent all of human time,
then a vertical line intersecting it at the birth of Christ,
and I added a stick figure of Plato standing
on the line and a small zero off to the side.
“You see,” I announced, “Plato was born
428 years before the birth of Christ.”
“But how did they know that?” she asked.
“Excellent question,” I replied, shaking my head.
Then from the back, another excellent one:
“And why do the languages change from English to Latin,
from ‘before Christ’ to ‘Anno Domini.’
You would think it would be the other way around.”
“You would think,” I repeated,
moving over to the big school window,
one finger pressed pensively to my lips,
to observe the orange and yellow trees,
patches of blue beyond them,
and a few ordinary birds darting through the scene,
until the bell, signaling the end of our class
and the beginning of something else, rang.
This was, after all, an introduction to poetry.