On this particular warm afternoon in late June, while elderly Miss Foote was giving the drowsy fifth grade class their Friday afternoon grammar lesson, even those in the front row, propping their drooping eyelids up with both hands, couldn’t make sense of the complicated diagram on the blackboard, which seemed to be labeled "Putative Exponent of the Masticatory Optative" and to refer, in some fashion they failed utterly to grasp, to Miss Foote herself and her longing to get home and have some fresh caramel cake with her iced coffee.