3f#27 – the professor
He wasn’t a relative. He wasn’t her godfather. He wasn’t even her guardian, but she’d been sent to stay with him in his rambling, damp house on Galway Bay. She was to call him Professor, and he spent much of his time like the professor in the Narnia books, locked away pursuing unfathomable and possibly magical matters.
The Professor lived with an Irish Setter—mad, soppy, antic. They took long daily walks and expected her to accompany them. Over the Burren, along the shore, up Connemara hills, in rain, in sun, in gale they walked.
He had no patience for petty regulations of the modern world. He bought his meat from a butcher out of the back of his farm, not licensed, but extraordinarily fresh and good. His milk came from a neighbor’s cow, his eggs from chickens down the lane. The hysterical alarms of contemporary life—H1N1, salmonella, pedophiles, climate change—meant nothing to him.
He did insist on certain courtesies. When he entered the room, she was to stand. When granted admission to his study, she was to give a small bow, more appropriate to a German schoolboy, she thought, than to an orphaned American girl. And when something she said or did indicated to him, by whatever mysterious code, that she required discipline, he administered it after the method of his childhood, with a slipper across his knee, or a worn leather strap. It was better, he said, all of it. More healthy, more traditional, more human.
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