I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU!

He would sit in his seat behind his desk, staring straight ahead, as the freshman class of the New York Institute of Technology dug into the American Literature final exam. His head did not move, but seems fixed on the back of the room, two or three degrees higher than level. He was a mysterious man with a keen mind.

He came from South Korea and taught design to us art majors and was filling in for the English and American Lit department for this test. Mr. Ahn was employing a technique of seeing everyone at once and no one in particular!

He made observations and sometimes they were down right funny, for instance one morning, I was about an hour early for my first class and stopped in the hospital diner next door to the college for breakfast one morning. There on a stool at the counter sat Mr. Ahn who invited me to sit with him. This was an honor for yours truly since his stature was much higher than mine in the pecking order in life.

On his plate was a dish of scrambled eggs. I hate eggs but would eat them if scrambled. I can’t stomach an egg yoke. The interesting thing about his eggs was the fact that he had ketchup on his plate and he would slide a fork filled egg into the ketchup. This intrigued me, so I ordered scrambled eggs.

In Mr. Ahn’s class along with me was my good buddy and crazy person Phil, my best friend and my daughter’s godfather. Phil was always on the cutting edge of insanity and how could I not befriend him?

Mr. Ahn: “Your friend, Phil, he crazy, no?”

“My friend Phil, is crazy yes.”

Mr. Ahn: “He do funny things, no?”

“He do funny things and crazy things yes.”

Just then my experimental eggs arrive and are dumped in front of me. I reach for the ketchup and grace the plate with it, next to my eggs.

Mr. Ahn: “Oh! You like ketchup with eggs too!”

“Oh sure, I do this all the time!”

This was of course my first time, and they were good and have been eating them ever since that way, but I didn’t need Mr. Ahn to have another crazy person on his hands, he would then throw an extra eye on me!