Note; since I skipped last week, you get two poss this week.-D.
When you get used to a place, anything out of the ordinary, out of place, you notice.
That's why, when someone opened the main door of my dorm and ran down the hallway in the middle of the night, I was awake-and anxious--even before I heard Steve Bees cry "HOLY SHIT!!"
He has the room next to mine this year.
His voice woke June and we both got up, put on pants, and poked our heads out the door. Steve's room light was on and spilling out the half-open door into the hallway. We could hear him moving around in there frantically. Other heads started poking out doors.
"Steve? Are you ok?" I asked. No answer.
"He probably got 'the call,'" suggested June. "His wife's in labor."
"Yes, but who ran down the hall?"
The hall door opened again and Cuppa Joe hurried in, fully dressed. Cuppa Joe, you may recall, is the husband of Security Joe, the now-retired campus security chief. Steve emerged from his room, also fully dressed and carrying a full knapsack, followed by Security Joe in pajamas and a red robe, who must have been the hall-runner.
"Hey, there, Dad," Cuppa Joe greeted Steve. "You ready?"
"What?"
"I'm your driver."
"I'm driving."
"No, friends don't let friends drive anxious at three AM. Gimme the keys."
"What? No."
"Come on, you want your wife to be all alone in the back seat? I'm already dressed. Gimme the keys."
"Oh, alright."
Steve handed over the keys and took off down the hall without acknowledging the small crowd that had collected around his door. Cuppa Joe followed, after a goodbye kiss from his mate.
"Call me," Security Joe said, and patted the other Joe's chest, fondly. They look odd, next to each other, and not because they're both men. It's because Security Joe is so little, not only short but petite, under a layer of aging, working-class muscle. His personality isn't little. Even half-asleep and in a bathrobe, Joe looks like an old cop from central casting, so you don't see his size until he stands next to another man and you realize he's eight to ten inches shorter than you'd expect. Cuppa Joe is as tall as I am, so the effect is even more startling. Plus, I don't usually see masters kiss.
Joe leaned in the doorway watching his receding mate, wearing an odd, almost nostalgic expression. Some of the assembled went back to bed, but Ollie, Eddie, June and I, and True, Nutmeg, and two yearlings, Mason and Jay, formed a cluster around Joe and the doorway.
"Well, that does it for sleep for us," said Eddie, quite brightly, speaking for all of us.
"There's no reason for you to stay up," said Joe. "They'll probably sleep at the hospital. She's not very far along, and first labors usually take a long time."
"Why did you come down?" asked Nutmeg. "Steve has a phone."
"He gave his phone to me at night so extraneous calls wouldn't wake the rest of you up. He wasn't sure 'vibrate' would wake him. I'm used to being on call, so I volunteered."
"And Coffee Joe volunteered as driver?"
"Yeah. When we had Rob, he drove about ninety miles an hour until I threatened to write him a speeding ticket myself in between contractions. We figured we'd lessen temptation for Steve."
"I imagine all new fathers are like that," said Ollie. "You're nervous and you want to be useful."
He and I made eye contact. I think we both had a sense of being the ones on deck, now.
"Not all fathers," pointed out Joe. "I was a little too busy to pace the hospital waiting room at the time."
"Do you miss it?" asked June. I suppose she meant whatever shred of femininity Joe had once had. It's not the sort of question you're supposed to ask in general, and Joe in particular is notably private. He gave her a look but elected to answer anyway.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "But not enough."
And he bid us goodnight with a courteous little nod and returned upstairs.
"It's strange, Steve having to go away to have his baby," said Nutmeg. "Like there ought to be some special School way of doing it. There is for everything else."
"I expect we'll do a welcoming ritual or a naming ceremony for the child afterwards," Eddie assured her.
"It seems...cold," said True."She ought to come here, or they should both stay home. "You wouldn't have a bunch of doctors and nurses and equipment around at the beginning of a pregnancy, why have them at the end? Birth is a sacred, natural process."
There were nods of agreement all around. This is one of the ideas that pretty much everyone around here learns to take for granted.
"You know what's also natural?" said Ollie, who doesn't like to take anything for granted. "Uterine rupture."
And on that rather depressing note, we turned out the light in Steve's room, shut his door, and went back to bed.
So, it seems as though my work as Steve's teacher is going to be delayed. The plan is for him to stay with his wife at home for some weeks, and then they'll decide whether to move the family to campus or if Steve should go back to splitting his time, as Ollie does. Either way, I don't think Steve will be back here until after Ostar.
We did talk that night, after class, about what my responsibilities will be. Charlie will be Steve's master, not Greg, and Charlie will delegate most of the day-to-day responsibility to me, though I'll work under his close supervision and with his direction and support. Partly I'll be repeating what Charlie taught me, just as I repeated what I learned in grad school to Charlie last year--though Charlie says it probably won't be necessary to push Steve so much into the science. He's not, temperamentally speaking, a naturalist. Rather, the point will be get him into the habit of close observation and awareness. And the point will be to teach me how to be somebody's master, though why I'm getting this intervention and no one else, to my knowledge, is, is beyond me. Maybe they think I need extra training, or something? I've never claimed to really know what I'm doing.
But it's obvious to me that all of this is about some kind of spiritual practice. For some reason, Greg and Charlie decided that neither the Christ nor the Buddha is Steve's best "way in" right now, which is why the meditation teacher tossed Quaker Steve over to Charlie for healing. And being a naturalist is a spiritual practice for Charlie. But is it for me? Ostensibly it must be, because Charlie was my spirit master and I graduated, but if so, I don't know what my spirituality consists of. Going outside doesn't feel especially religious to me. I don't have all kinds of fancy ideas about energy and animism, or whatever else, supporting the practice. Does Charlie? I don't know. But aren't I supposed to at least understand a topic before I teach it? Don't I have to have something to give it away?
Although I suppose there is something else that gets given when the person giving didn't have it before: birth.
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