‘Odysseus and the Suitors’: An A+++ Report

THE FXBG ADVANCE FRIDAY 7/31/26 AFTERNOON READ

By Ben Raterman, GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

In ninth grade, everybody in my English class had to write an essay on The Odyssey, but the night before it was due, I was still stuck working on mine. When my dad got home and saw me sitting at the dining room table in front of my mother’s old Smith-Corona, the first thing he did was comment on the change in furniture arrangement, something my mother did periodically to mix things up as suited her whimsy. Next he petted our dog, Jack, who lay on his stomach, head on his outstretched paws. Jack gave the old man a one-eyed grin.

Finally, my dad looked at me and said, “Homework?” I nodded, glancing at my school-issued Adventures in Literature paperback, opened to The Odyssey.

My mother spoke from the kitchen, “English. He’s had the assignment for two weeks now. Just getting around to doing it.”

I gave a lame excuse for having put it off.

“You were busy fighting the Trojans,” my father said, getting a laugh from my mother, who walked into the dining room just then and peered at the blank paper hanging like a dry tongue on the typewriter carriage.

“Not likely,” she said.

At 10 that night, I pulled a single sheet of paper from the typewriter—half a page of text—and stuffed it into my backpack. I figured I’d get a D just for handing it in, not bad enough to ruin my C average for the term.

The next morning, I hiked half a mile to the main road and got on the bus. English was first period. Walking into class, I saw that many of my classmates had multi-page reports on their desks. I reached into my backpack expecting to find the lousy half page I’d produced, but pulled out a three-page report instead. I was stunned and began to read. Of course, my mother had written it.

I turned it in anyway.

Two days later, the teacher handed back our assignments. Surely she must have known I hadn’t written mine, but there at the top of the first page, in red ink, she’d scrawled “Priceless!! A+++.”

Here’s my mother’s report, which she titled “Odysseus and the Suitors,” and which Christopher Nolan is welcome to use in the PR campaign for his new film, which I saw last week and which is also terrific.

Mom confused Mercury for Aeolus, perhaps on purpose. There were typing errors, enough to make it look like someone unfamiliar with a typewriter—and a poor grammarian—had typed it. She took wild liberties with the English language and with the story itself. She was having fun, I realized years later.

She had always wanted to be a journalist, but motherhood in those days worked against her. I have 11 feet of shelves filled with her letters, a fraction of what she wrote over her 87 years.

At 80 words a minute on the Smith-Corona, it probably took Mom no more than 15 minutes to write my essay. She was that fast.

I doubt AI could do as well.

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Odysseus and the Suitors

One of the most famous tales of Greek mythology is the adventures of Odysseus. This Odysseus had been fighting for ten years if you can believe it, in the Trojan wars. Finally, the wars are over and he says, I’m goin home to my little Penelope, who is pining away in Ithaca. So he sets out in a boat and has the most god-awful mess of adventures you ever saw—fighting monsters and getting all mixed up in caves, and just when he’d think he was on that last lap of the forty mile hike home, whammo, another god would slap him with a snake or a lotus blossom or something and he’d have to putter around talking to a bunch of dead jerks while some mangy skeletons played farm and country music on a snail’s tail. Well, he sure got bored with this jazz and was almost off his rocker when old Mercury, taking time out from Western Union, gave him a good head wind that landed him with a dull thud on his own sandy soil. Along came his little sonny boy; only he had trouble climbing onto Poppa’s lap because he was 20 yrs old. His name was Telemachus, which is where they get “tell-it-to-the-Marines” while he and Sonny were getting caught up on how the neighbors were and whose dogs were eating whose best shrubbery, durned if another goddess, named Athena didn’t show up. Odysseus almost let her have it across the chops, but she said “bud, I’m on your side, me and Telly here, fine lad isn’t he even if his feet don’t match, well, we’ll take you home; only, if you walk in on Penny like that, she’ll throw a fit.

“So, let’s just change you into an old bum.” Well, Oddy had had enough of this god business and didn’t care much for being a bum but said he’d have a go of it for the last few miles. Pretty soon there he is in rags a ‘limpin over them Greek stones with his big toes stickin out; and he sure stubbed them when he heard that Penelope had so many boyfriends the walls were about to crack. Not only that; they were lapping up all his good beer and eating him out of house and home. That did it!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Penelope finally got the idea that after twenty years that maybe the old boy had been et up by monsters, and what with standing over a hot stove all day, maybe she ought to marry one of the 150 odd balls who were always buttin in when she told Telemachus how to do his arithmetic or to blow his nose or somethin. So she gets out Oddy’s old bow and arrow and goes into the dining room where these guys are having their clam bake and using her best linen napkins and says, “Boys --the party’s over ---we’re going to play a little game.” This makes the boys quit their guzzling and they start to leer because Penny was a pretty dish even if she was forty, wore arch supports and had gold bridgework, and there wasn’t a one who wouldn’t like to play a little game with her. But she ignored their smirking and said “this here is my brave husband’s bow and arrow. Get your hands out of the soup and have a go at it and the first jerk that can let fly a bullseye through those ten beer cans is the one who’ll march to the preacher with me.

Well—man! There was a whoopin and a hollerin such as you never did see as each guy grabs the bow thinking he’s William t-hell or somethin. What a surprise they had wasn’t a one of those lugs could even bend that old dusty bow. About that time Oddy, looking like a stumble bum, says “let an old man try and he nudges Telly and they’re just laughin fit to bustin. Of course, the jerks said, “frow da bum out”, but Telly says “Look! This is still my home. I’m the one what says around here and I says, let the bum try!” Course he winks to his ole daddy

so that after his daddy wins, he wouldn’t cuff him across the cheek when he remembers Telly calling him a bum. Well, Oddy steps up in his mission barrel rags, and whammy! Right down through all the ten beer cans goes the arrow. Boy, did those jerks sag. Before you could say scat, he turned to Telly and says gimme them arrows son, we may as well do this up brown. And pop, pop, pop, over goes one jerk after another until he was knee deep in ‘um and it was quite a mess. But by this time, he was used to messes, what with monsters and man-eaters and stuff. He says, Telly, “your maw and I got business, so you get a mop and clear up this place...my fifty miles is over and I want some peace.” Of course, by then the god had changed him back into a tall, handsome warrior with muscles popping out of his blue serge suit and when Penelope saw him, she says “this is for me.”

Thee End!

Page one of my Mom’s essay

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Ben Raterman lives in Virginia and writes overlooking a creek that bounces over large rocks and slides into a lazy river. Born in Hawaii, then moving to Virginia, he later traveled with his family to India, where his high school studies mixed with a clash of cultures bubbling up a desire to write. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, he spent time in the Peace Corps. His work experience includes tire changer, Good Humor man, remodeler of fallen down houses, new-house builder, systems engineer, river watcher and builder of wheelchair ramps. You can visit his author website HERE.