My name is Arthur Penhallow. I am sixty-seven years old. For thirty-eight years I taught Latin at a high school in central Vermont, to something like four thousand young people, perhaps a dozen of whom have forgiven me. I retired in 1995. My wife, Margaret, died in March of 1997. I live now in the house we bought in 1961, with her cat, Pliny, who tolerates me.

On Saturday, the second of October, my son David will stand up in a church in Boston with Michael, the man he has loved for eleven years, and they will make their promises to one another. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts will not recognize it. For a good many years, neither did I. I have been asked to give a toast. These notes are, among other things, my attempt to deserve the invitation.

By the Roman reckoning, today is a.d. VI Kal. Oct., the sixth day before the Kalends of October, and the ceremony falls on a.d. VI Non. Oct., the sixth day before the Nones. The sixth day before, both times. The Romans would have made something of that. I shall try not to.

The harvest moon came up last night over Bea's barn like a great brass gong, and I sat on the porch under two blankets until nearly eleven, which at my age is dissipation.

Today, the dress rehearsal for the cake. Seven McIntoshes from the orchard up the road. Margaret's card propped against the flour tin. Three hundred fifty degrees, about an hour. At fifty-two minutes I stood in the kitchen with my eyes closed and — I cannot put this any other way — it smelled right. Cinnamon and butter and apple and a particular browning at the edges that is the smell of every autumn Sunday from 1957 to 1996. I took it out. Then I sat down on the kitchen floor, which I do not recommend at sixty-seven, and wept like a boy. Pliny came and sat on my foot.

Bea came over at four and had a piece and said, "Well, Arthur," and nothing more, which is Bea for a standing ovation.

The toast is finished, or as finished as it will be. It is two minutes long. It has one quotation, Virgil, the whole line, and I translate it. The rest is plain English, and some of it is the truth about what I was and what I am, and all of it is for them.

I drive down Friday. My suit is at the cleaner's. The cake will travel in Margaret's tin carrier on the passenger seat, with the belt fastened around it, like a person.

Six days. Et nos cedamus Amori.

The equinox. Day and night in balance, which is more than can be said for me.

Marcus Aurelius opens the Meditations with a list. Before any philosophy, before a single word on virtue or death, he simply sets down what he owes, and to whom: to his grandfather Verus, to his mother, to his tutors, to Rusticus, to Sextus. A ledger of debts. (He kept it, I should add, in Greek, which I have always held against him.) I think it the finest thing in the book, and this morning on the porch, in two sweaters, I tried my own.

From my father: that a man should keep his word and his shoes clean, and that the first matters more.
From my Latin master at school: that grammar is a form of courtesy toward the dead.
From Margaret: nearly everything else. That the heart can be taught, even late. That one laughs at weddings. That the kitchen is not a foreign country.
From David: courage. That a young man may tell the truth to his father in a kitchen at twenty-two, and wait ten years for an answer, and never once stop loving him.
From Michael: that one may be patient beyond all reason and call it nothing.
From Jim: that I was not the only slow one.
From Pliny: that one may sit on a draft and improve it.
From Marcus himself: that it is time to stop arguing about what a good man ought to be, and be one. He says so somewhere in the tenth book; I have given up finding my place in Margaret's old Penguin, which falls open wherever she marked it.

Nine days. Draft nine.

Yesterday I met Michael's parents.

I drove down to Boston in the morning: three hours and a quarter, the last forty minutes of which were spent attempting to understand Boston traffic, which does not wish to be understood. David and Michael's apartment is on a third floor in the South End, with a great many stairs and a great many books, and it smelled of something Michael was making with mushrooms and a great deal of patience. (Risotto. He stirred it for forty minutes. I watched as a novice watches a master.)

Jim and Rosemary arrived from Worcester at four. Jim is a retired letter carrier, broad and quiet, with the hands of a man who carried a bag for thirty years. Rosemary was a school secretary, which is to say she ran a school, and she hugged me in the doorway before I had my coat off. I am not a hugger. I found I did not object.

Dinner was at first rather like a Latin prose composition: correct, careful, and not very lively. We discussed the traffic. We discussed the weather. We discussed the Red Sox, who are doing well, which I gather is a source of great anxiety in that part of the world. David and Michael kept looking at each other across the table the way I remember looking at Margaret across her parents' table in 1956.

After dinner Jim said, "Arthur, you want to walk?" and we walked around the block twice in the dark, past the brick bow-fronts. After a while he said, not looking at me, "It took me a while, too."

I said, "It took me ten years."

He said, "Five. Rosemary, about a week." And then: "Our wives were smarter than us."

I said, "Mine still is." He understood that I meant the present tense, and he did not correct me, and I liked him very much from that moment on.

We climbed back up the stairs to coffee and Rosemary's pie, and I told the story of David at the age of seven trying to teach the cat Latin with flash cards, and everyone laughed, David included. For a moment it felt as though there were six of us at that table, and that the sixth was enjoying herself enormously.

I drove home this morning. A few maples along the highway have begun to turn, scarlet at the top, like a man embarrassed. I know the feeling.

Rain all day, the far tail of that terrible hurricane which has drowned so much of North Carolina. The porch is useless, and so am I. Draft seven has gone into the stove. Pliny and I have agreed not to discuss it.

More when the sun returns.

Cooking, lesson the sixth. My text is The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, the library's copy, in which some previous scholar has left a gravy stain on the page for gravy. I took it as a recommendation.

For forty years Margaret cooked and I washed up. It was a fair division of labor, and I regret now that I never once asked her to show me anything. I can conjugate any verb you like in six tenses; until July I could not boil an egg without consulting both the clock and my conscience.

Progress to date:
Scrambled eggs: mastered. Low heat. Fannie is firm on this, and Fannie is right.
Roast chicken: twice. The second was pronounced "real food" by Bea next door, which from Bea amounts to a knighthood.
Rice: a catastrophe. We shall not speak of the rice. The pot is soaking still, three days on, like a penitent.
Pot roast: this evening. The smoke detector and I had a frank exchange of views at 6:40.
Margaret's apple cake: first attempt Saturday. It was cake. It was not her cake. It smelled nearly right. Nearly.

There is something consoling about a recipe. It is the last genre of literature that still believes wholeheartedly in the imperative mood. Take two eggs. Beat until smooth. Do not open the oven. I have always been at home in the imperative. I spent my working life issuing it.

Draft four of the toast. I have been auditioning Latin.

Carpe diem: rejected. It has been printed on too many coffee mugs, and Horace meant something a good deal sadder by it than the mugs do.

Omnia vincit Amor: tempting. Virgil, the tenth Eclogue. Everyone remembers it as "Amor vincit omnia," but that is the motto on the Prioress's brooch in Chaucer; Virgil puts the verb in the middle, where it belongs. The trouble is that everyone will nod and think of greeting cards. But the line goes on, and the second half is the part that interests me: et nos cedamus Amori. "And let us, too, yield to Love." Us, too. The ones who resisted. The ones who took ten years to yield. That, I think, is my toast, if I have the nerve.

Cicero, in the De Amicitia, calls a true friend tamquam alter idem, "as it were, a second self." Lovely, and true of them. But Cicero was a prig, and I do not want him at the reception.

For thirty-eight years I gave my students one rule for speeches: one quotation, and translate it, because nobody at a wedding wishes to feel stupid. David tells me Michael's uncle is a Jesuit and will expect the Latin. I shall keep my rule regardless. The Jesuit can have the translation like everyone else.

Pliny has been sitting on draft four all afternoon. It is the most useful thing that has happened to it.

Forty-two years ago today, at eleven in the morning, Margaret married me in a white church in her hometown, in a heat wave, in a dress her mother made. I got the ring stuck at the second knuckle, and she laughed out loud in front of the minister. I have never been so happy as I was at that laugh.

I took asters up to the cemetery this afternoon, the purple ones from the roadside; she disapproved of florists. I told her about the toast, and about Fannie Farmer, and that Pliny had been sick on the stairs again. One tells the dead the news. I do not know whether that is foolish, and at my age I have stopped asking.

Then I came home and did something I have not been able to do in two years. I opened her recipe box, the tin one with the chickens painted on it. Her apple cake is in there, on an index card in her hand, spotted with butter, and headed Apple Cake (Arthur's). I had not known it was called that. The instructions end: "350 for about an hour, or until it smells right."

Or until it smells right. For a man who has spent his life on the precision of the gerundive, this is a very difficult instruction.

I am going to make it for the reception. The McIntoshes at the orchard up the road will be ready in a week or so. I have four weeks to learn what "right" smells like.

Karen tells me that people who keep these journals are often very honest in them, and that the readers are kind. I shall test the proposition.

David told us on Thanksgiving Day, 1986. He was twenty-two, home from graduate school, and he told us in the kitchen while Margaret was basting the bird. He had clearly rehearsed. He was very brave. And I, who had spent my life praising courage in Virgil and Horace to adolescents, looked down at the table and said: "Pass the rolls."

I did not shout. I did not forbid anything. I should like it recorded that I never said a cruel word to him. What I did instead was worse, and I knew it was worse even then: I withheld. For years. I was polite. I asked about his work and never about his life. When he mentioned Michael, I turned the conversation to the weather, which in Vermont is always available.

Margaret did not withhold. She wrote to him every week. In 1989 she met Michael on a trip to Boston she described to me as "shopping," and she came home and said, "He's lovely, Arthur, and you're a fool," and went up to bed. She was right on both counts.

What changed me was not an argument. It was the winter of 1996. Margaret was ill, and we both knew what kind of ill. And every Friday night of that winter, David and Michael drove up from Boston, four hours in the snow, and every Sunday night they drove back. Michael cooked. Michael read Trollope aloud to her when her eyes were too tired. Michael shoveled the walk, which I had been meaning to do. One evening I came up to the bedroom and found him asleep in the chair beside her, holding her hand, and she asleep too, and I stood in the doorway and understood that I had been failing an examination for ten years, and that the examiners had been patient with me beyond all reason.

After the funeral I wrote Michael a letter. It was the hardest composition of my life, and the shortest. I will not reproduce it here. He has it. He tells me he keeps it in a drawer with his grandmother's rosary, which is a greater honor than the letter deserved.

I have been late to nearly everything important. I intend to be on time for the second of October.

David telephoned this evening, as he does every Sunday at seven. He asked, carefully, as though handling a cracked vase, whether I would give a toast at the reception. "Just a few words, Dad. Whatever you want." I said yes before the fear arrived. It arrived at approximately 7:04.

Whatever you want. Thirty-eight years of teaching boys and girls to say exactly what they mean, in a language that punishes imprecision, and I do not know what I want to say. No, that is not true. I know. I do not know how to say it without first saying what I was, and I am not certain a wedding toast is the place for a confession. Margaret would know. Margaret would have written it on the back of an envelope in the car and made everyone cry, including the caterers.

The invitation has been on the mantel since June. Cream card, black ink, both their names, and beneath them, together with their families. I read that line most days. Together with their families. I am their family. I am trying to be.

Salvete, whoever you are.

I am told that the proper way to begin one of these is to explain oneself, which a teacher of thirty-eight years ought to be able to do in a paragraph and cannot.

Briefly, then. I am sixty-seven. I taught Latin. My wife has been gone two years and a half, and my son is to be married, or as near to married as the law allows, on the second of October, and I have been asked to speak. I have given, by a rough count, eleven thousand lessons on the ablative absolute, and I am more frightened of these three minutes than of any of them.

The library's "Internet for Seniors" class, Tuesdays at ten, is taught by a patient young woman named Karen who sat in the third row of my Latin I in 1988 and received a B-minus. She has repaid me with kindness and this "home page," which is more than I deserved. When I asked what one does with a home page, she said, "Mr. Penhallow, you write things down. You always told us to." Hoist, as they say, with my own petard. (That is Shakespeare, not Latin; I am permitted the occasional lapse.)

On Wednesday the evening news showed the eclipse in Europe, the moon's shadow crossing Cornwall and France and on toward Turkey, crowds falling quiet at midday. The Romans called it defectio solis, the failing of the sun, and took it very personally. I watched it alone in the kitchen and turned, as I still do, to tell Margaret. Two and a half years, and I still turn.

This morning on the porch, with coffee I made myself (adequate) and Marcus Aurelius (excellent), I decided I would try.

Margaret - my wife, 1934-1997. Forty years less six months. Right about nearly everything.
David - our son, 35. An architect in Boston. Braver than his father.
Michael - David's partner these eleven years. Teaches the fourth grade outside Boston. Makes a risotto that ought to be illegal.
Jim and Rosemary - Michael's parents, of Worcester. Lately met, already liked.
Ellen - my sister, in Rutland. Has opinions, and a telephone.
Bea - next door. Casseroles, candor.
Karen - of the library. Latin I, 1988. B-minus. Forgiven, and forgiving.
Pliny - Margaret's cat. Named for the Elder, though he favors the Younger in his fondness for letters; he sits on the mail.
Marcus Aurelius - emperor, A.D. 121-180. On the porch with me most mornings.

Letters are welcome: [email protected]

My thanks to the father in Oregon who wrote to say it is never too late, and to the young man in Georgia whose own father has not yet come around. I hope he does. I hope he is quicker about it than I was.