With Italian food covered for now, we move on to other fare. There's Mexican, and its corrollary Texican - slash - TexMex, to consider. Jay's palate doesn't like being singed, so the milder spiciness suits him fine. His favorite Mexican dish is Chile Relleno, a wondrous concoction prepared with roasted chile peppers and cheese. Tangy, but not painful. He also likes tamales, enchiladas, and of course tacos in their many guises.

Jay visited actual Mexico in person once, decades ago. He dined like royalty in a small place in Reynosa, Mexico, where no one spoke a word of English. Jay's learned some Spanish since then, but on the trip south, south, south from Fort Worth, Texas, his traveling partner, a professor of mathematical-type stuff and a long time friend, assured him there'd be no need for Jay to cram Spanish skills along the way, as university classes were still fresh in his mind. They drove on, and when they got to Mexico, the first test of the good professor's Spanish was a road sign that said (forgive any misspelling after all these years), "No estacionarse." Jay, who was driving, asked frantically, "What does that mean? Is this a one-way street?" The professor shrugged a "don't know." Fortunately it only meant no parking, though cars were parked all around the sign.

After several days and many other great episodes, Jay and his friend dined in the nicest restaurant they'd seen in Reynosa. Jay spotted it the night before, observing that a block-long line of well dressed Mexican families were lined up outside, waiting for tables. Jay and his friend went early, to avoid the rush. The waiter brought the menu, and Jay asked his professor friend to translate. Unfortunately, Professor Math didn't know Mexican food, and asked the waiter if he spoke English. Nope, sorry.

Undaunted, Jay looked through the menu and pointed to everything he recognized. He'd learned the word "dos," two, and repeated "dos" for each item he pointed out. The waiter jotted furiously on a pad, saying things and asking questions. Jay nodded, though he understood none of it. After much gesturing and smiling all around, the waiter went off, presumably to the kitchen. In a few minutes the feast began. Dozens of dishes, all of them delectable though Jay knows not to this day what they might have been, accompanied by an inexhaustible supply of tortillas, salsas and garnishes. And bottled water - Jay'd seen a truck unloading the huge jugs of water the day before.

Jay and the Prof are both what we call here in the South "big eaters." They consume mass quantities of food, the more if it's good, and even more if they've starved all day in anticipation of a fancy meal, as they did in Reynosa. Even so, it turned out that everything Jay pointed to on the menu was in fact a "family" meal intended for several people. After a while, Jay and the Prof asked, no, begged, the waiter to stop bringing food. With some difficulty they finally succeeded in getting him to desist. Then the Prof got worried. "Oh, no," he worried, "we've run up a huge bill and we won't have enough money and we'll be imprisoned in a foreign land, never to be heard from again."

A while later, the Prof agonizing the whole time, the waiter presented the bill. Translated from pesos to dollars, it was little more than a couple of Happy Meals on the other side of the Rio Grande. Sighs of relief. Jay and his friend left an enormous tip, and smiled all the way back to the hotel.

Here's another one, adapted from Jay's stellar endeavors as editor of Verbatim, the newsletter of the Midlands Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. This tale is about his favorite High School English teacher. She's why you won't read certain... "phrases" in this tome. Okay, here's Jay.

Impeccably prim, our wool-suited English teacher strode in from the hallway. Sensible heels, tick, on the cheap tile floor. She dropped her gradebook onto the desk, set the battered wooden lectern aside and stood laser-level straight, pine-tree tall at the greenboards in front of the class. “B O B O,” she lettered in yellow chalk. Her bony hand made deliberate, precise strokes easily readable from the farthest reaches of the room. Perfect.

Miss Bobo was, herself, exactly that.  Perfect, unerring, unforgiving - and easily readable from the back row of seats.  She had certain “requirements” - demands, really - that had to be met, and she set them out methodically in stern tones on the first day of classes, emphasizing her points by stabbing her index finger toward the ceiling and lowering her gaze to peer over her dark-rimmed reading glasses after each one. Ominous, intimidating, intriguing.

Think and be

“Cogito ergo sum,” she began. Gaze. “Ergo, people who do not think do not exist. Therefore, in my class do not ever not think.” Meaning: don’t think you’ll pass Senior English at Aiken High. Miss Bobo’s cogito corollary was her dearest pet peeve, her biggest booboo, a Rubicon you did not cross. You did not answer her question about Chaucer’s Wife of Bath with “I don’t think she was a slut.” You could say “I think she wasn’t a slut,” or even “I don’t know.” However, mere utterance of the forbidden “I don’t think” got you a brooding frown and a red mark in her grade book. Sometimes even a sarcasm. But really, she had a point. Think not, be not; think and be. Be or be not, Shakespeare wrote, but think and at least be graduated, and then not-think your way through English 101 if you can.

Miss Bobo’s classes were advanced, “college prep.” All of her students would matriculate at some college, even me. It was her duty, her mission-from-the-diety, she explained, to make sure that we not only did not not-think, but also could indeed think. Cogito with the best of ‘em and communicate the fact verbally or in ink, without blinking an eye, and never omitting the dot over one, either. She warned us first thing, and reiterated her warnings anytime someone slipped up. She explained that she considered not not-thinking to be her personal goal for every class. I don’t think she ever failed.

Miss Bobo started every class with a short discussion of the material that her students, whom she insisted be seated in alphabetical order, should have read from the textbook or other resource. Her lectures were excruciatingly grammatical, meticulously organized, and beautifully incisive. “Every character has a flaw,” she orated on Chaucer’s Canterbury rimes. “The Wife of Bath, debatably, is promiscuous; the cook is dirty; the Miller, well, you’ll have to see for yourself.” Wicked wink. "If you dare."

Why: a favorite question

For testing, Miss Bobo didn’t think in terms of true/false or multiple guess. She thought essays - well organized, well thought out, and skillfully argued. “Compare the... with those from...” and “discuss why....” Keyword “why,” a favorite question of hers, and often a difficult one for which there is no simple, or even correct, answer. Stick close to the subject, organize thoroughly before you set pen to paper or tongue to teeth, answer the question directly, and whatever you do, don’t make any Bobo booboos when you write. Or when you speak, even exemporaneously.

In addition to not not-thinking, she had a sizeable list of no-nos. Here are some that have stuck with me after more than forty years. Some are here for entertainment, and some for admonishments. Some are way obsolete, now, and some still ring true. You’re on your own as to which is which. However, as with all of Miss Bobo’s booboos, you can’t be faulted for following them, though in some cases you can for breaking them.

Miss Bobo’s booboo list

> And what kind of sort is that?  In Miss Bobo's class there was never a sort of anger, nor a kind of repression. Miss Bobo despised the terms. She was quite binary about most things. Are you mad or not? You're either repressed or you're not, or maybe you could try to get a 'somewhat' past her if you must qualify. Well, are you or not, she still would have asked. And to which sort of repression do you refer, exactly? Is "somewhat" a disease or a degree? A fruit, perhaps?  Kind of funny, eh? Well, you sort of get her point. Don't you?

> “Not only” is not the only part of the construction, which not only won’t stand alone, but also won’t do with only “but” on the other side. In other words, if you start with “not only,” you absolutely must have “but also,” not just “but.” As in: “I think the Miller’s tale not only raises eyebrows, but also blazes trails in low-brow humor.” Moreover, the connected parts must not only be related, but also be parallel. Perfectly parallel, not just somewhat close. Sentence structure, tense, gender, number, and the tint of the spots on its underwear. Parallel to the max. “Everyone has a ‘but,’” she explicated-admonished-adjured with a smirk. “Cover yours with an ‘also,’ and your grade will reflect your effort.”

> Don’t divide. To split an infinitive was to incur Miss Bobo’s ire. There was no reason, no excuse to humanly err, and little probability for Bobo to divinely forgive.

> Don’t start. If you’re going to do a thing, just do it. Don’t begin or start something. This was a major biggie with her, and she was right. In the South we love to fix to do something. Like, “I’m fixin’ to start the turnips a-boilin’.” Best not speak that abomination in Boboland. Best not read much literature, either, or this one will start to bother you, too. Authors, even famous ones, sin often.

> Waste if you must, but never want. Not many emcees would pass Bobo’s class: “I want to welcome you all....” Nor Oscar winners: “I want to thank my mother....” Unless you’re not going to, she urged, don’t want to do something, just do it.

> Don’t partialize. Whether spoken or written, English sentences have subjects and verbs, at least one of each. If your sentence fragment had two or fewer words, and if you could defend it as contextually sound without sweating, you might have a chance to get one over. Otherwise, no.

> Precisely write precise words. For example, don’t use “less” if you need “fewer.” Less is quantity; few is number: less flour, but fewer cups of sugar. Further is conceptual, farther is space. Subtle, but true. Precision, precision!
> She preferred and encouraged the correct use of “more than” instead of “over” when “over” is just plain lazy, which most of the time it is. You could write “over the fence” but “more than fifty yards,” not “over.” Picky, but correct, in her Chaucer’s Knight’s way. The Knight’s character flaw, she explained, spewing and obviously relishing self criticism, was a perfectionist.

>This and that won’t stand for everything. Picture a paragraph of action, sentence after sentence, after which the sumup “this” can’t stand for all of that and keep on going, like:  “Smith threw rocks at me, and this made me mad.” The word “this” must be specific, like “this action” or “this situation.” Otherwise Smith will keep on with the rocks, gleefully assisted by Miss Bobo.

In addition to her peeves list, she invoked the usual forbidden constructions like passive voice, verbs to be, lazy adjectives and adverbs, run-on sentences, and such. However, she was willing to cut some slack on most of these if you could argue persuasively that the context justified the infraction. The class was creative writing and literature. She took “creative” creatively, and encouraged breaking conventional rules. Except hers.

Forbidden reading

Miss Bobo cleverly “assigned” extracurricular reading that was prohibited by the benighted Aiken, South Carolina, school district’s vigilant thought police. Chaucer’s infamously bawdy Miller’s tale, for example. Although printed unexpurgated in the course’s textbook, it was forbidden reading. She explained, simply, that the county’s all-knowing censors did not, repeat not, permit her to assign us to read the tale, because of its racy content, and she would not dare defy them. If we did want to read it, however, she was not in a position to stop us, and felt no obligation to prohibit speaking or writing about it in class. Indeed, she kept a little list. 

The same prohibitions applied to certain works of Huxley, Orwell and others – a list of which, she said with a smirk, she had dutifully mimeographed while off of school property and would distribute after class outside the walls of her room. She had just enough copies for every one of the thirty-eight students. The purple-lettered page was entitled “Forbidden Reading List.” In keeping with the rules with which she did not agree but was obligated to follow, she suggested we not check out any of the offensive literature from the county’s public library according to  Dewey’s decimals printed on the sheet.

The school’s own library didn’t have them so don’t bother looking, but the county library maintained multiple copies of each on hand. Neither should the banned books be purchased in paperback from local bookstores or from the book sections of the local dimestores, most of which carried them in stock. Nuff said. In a short time the entire class, including both preachers’ sons and the Jewish kid, could expertly discuss the offending volumes. Miss Bobo did not assign them for reading. She didn’t have to.

Rules and booboos notwithstanding, Miss Bobo strongly encouraged creativity, especially if you could creatively break a rule and defend it (vigorously) as essential to the context. Ask “why” if you wish, but prepare for an extended hairsplitting explanation that delved into reams of thought far beyond high school. I loved every minute of her class. However, I waited till I got to college to break any of her rules.