While stepping into a bakery can be filled with unexpected pleasures- a tray filled with small wedges of freshly baked bread to try for example, or squares of lemon cake to sample while your order is being filled or perhaps running into a friend- you don’t really expect to see Julius Caesar.
Photo: Bust of Caesar-Museo Nazionale Romano
But there he was, seated at a table with a mug of coffee and a cookie on small plate with a crumpled napkin on one side and a book on the other. Let me clarify that it wasn’t really the emperor himself but the actor who played him at the local repertory.
Photo: Richard Donelly played Julius Caesar in Season 19 at the Gamm Theatre, Rhode Island.
I joined the end of line to place my order and exchanged glances with Julius. Should I say hello ? No leave him be, let him have his privacy. “Stop Dad, don’t” my kids’, voices said collectively in my head. I turned my gaze away and towards the confectionary, but then this popped up in my mind.
Brutus: There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune…
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
I turned around. Strike when the iron is hot!
“Good morning, I just want to say I loved your Julius Caesar. I took my three school- age children and insisted they had to see it too.”
His face lit up and he moved his right hand and placed it across his chest to left, over his heart and beamed, ”You made my day, thank you ,I am here memorizing my lines for the next play”, he added gesturing to the book by his side.
I remembered the staging of the play. The cast wore suits not togas and carried guns not daggers and TV newscasters sat across desks flanked by monitors that said,” Good Morning Rome”, as if in a morning talk show. The sound of gunfire filled the stage as Caesar was brought down.
As I inched to the front of the line more dialogue played in my head,
Cassius: Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
Brutus: No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things.
My mind drifted back to the ninth grade that marked my first encounter with Julius Caesar in a literature class of Father John Beez, a Jesuit priest from Chicago who taught us English in New Delhi at the St.Xavier’s High School, moving from Shakespeare to George Bernard Shaw’s,” Caesar and Cleopatra” and then on to Terence Rattigan’s, ”Adventure Story” which was about Alexander the Great and ending with a deep dive into Chinua Achebe’s, “Things Fall Apart”.
Photo: With Fr. John Beez, SJ 1967
Below: School and work book photos.
I collected my order- cold coffee, light ice- and stood at a table, my back to Julius, while I added a splash of oat milk. I reached for the sugar syrup to add two pumps when a lovely young lady said,” Excuse me sir”. I looked up meeting her eye.” Sorry, she said I mistook you for some one else”.
“Who did you think I was”, I asked?
“You must have a twin who is a physician at the Miriam Hospital”, she said.
Or I might just be that twin, I muttered and then an elderly lady standing alongside said, ”She mistook you for him”, pointing to Caesar, whom she had obviously recognized as a celebrity.
I reached for a napkin to clean off the excess oat milk and syrup from the lid of the coffee cup and almost knocked over a bottle of olive oil but then deftly caught it from splattering at the feet of the Emperor.
I gave a final bow to Caesar and exited the bakery.