Mastery Year 2: Litha

Happy Litha!

Lately it’s been seeming like my favorite holiday is whichever one we’re having at the time you ask. Each has its own things to like. What I like best about Litha is the giant picnic of it, seeing faculty and students in the context of their families—this whole extra part of the school community we hardly ever see otherwise.

Mine came over, of course, and here I mean my brother and his wife and children, not my parents or sister. Their kids, Paul, Ruthie, and Chris (can you tell we’re Christian?) are full-on sprouts, now, six, five, and three years old, respectively, so almost as soon as they arrived they all vanished into some world of the sprouts’ creation, and we didn’t get more than a glimpse of them for the rest of the evening.

“I remember when mine were like that,” commented Allen, nostalgically.

“One of yours still is,” I reminded him, since Alexis is 11 and still a sprout in good standing.

“I pluralized my nostalgia,” he reminded me, a little sternly. Allen is always very precise with his language. Then he smiled a little and I laughed.

We picnicked with Allen and Lo, as usual, since they seem to have adopted me, and Ebony, whose mother I have still never met. Apparently, she and Allen have largely repaired their relationship—I still sense a kind of mutual cautiousness that I never noticed before, but also a kind of deliberateness, as though they are building something together. Today, she actually laid her head on his thigh, an extraordinary gesture of affection which made Allen visibly uncomfortable for a few seconds, since that is not normally any way to treat one’s professor. I think she was trying things, to see what would happen, and what happened was that after a few seconds, Allen seemed to make up is mind to go with it. He relaxed a little and, cautiously at first, then with a more absent-minded air, stroked her hair.

The day was incredibly hot, and the Central Field where we picnicked had filled with bees, attracted both to the clover and dandelions in the grass and to the foods and drinks and desserts scattered among the picnic blankets of well over a hundred families. After we ate, my brother John and I left June and the others and took a walk, largely to be social. We dipped in and out of conversations, exchanged benign gossip, and I introduced John to some of the people he hadn’t known, yet. A lot of them knew him only as “Paul and Ruthie’s father,” which surprised him but not me.

Apple Blossom, a yearling, wanted to know why it’s called “Litha,” not “Solstice,” and Aimee, who is also a yearling and was sharing her picnic blanket, asked “well, then, why Apple Blossom?” in tones suggesting that names are just weird around here and ought not to be questioned.

“Because I’m pretty and sweet,” explained Apple Blossom. “Everything does have a reason.”

But I didn’t know the reason for “Litha,” and neither did John, though he wondered aloud if perhaps it had to do with the river, Leith, in Ireland. We moved on.

John spent a while talking about alchemy with Acorn and then debating—yes, debating—religion with Samara and Edna, and then Aaron, the librarian, whose picnic spot was nearby, snagged our attention by remarking that John and I do look so much alike. Half a dozen people were clustered around Aaron, most of whom I’d never seen before—his family, I suppose, though I’d never thought of him as having a family, apart from us, but there they were. Aaron explained that they lived in Florida and rarely got to visit. One picnicker I did recognize—Ahab, Aaron’s pet scarlet macaw. He wore a long leash, tied to his right ankle (his wings are not clipped) but otherwise seemed able to do what he wanted, and was busy demolishing a big pile of strawberries.

“I know you are, but what am I?” he said, clearly, when he saw me looking at him. Aaron laughed.

Mason and Jay, two more yearlings, neither of whom had invited family (like me my first year, they had not realized family could be invited) had camped out with Aaron and his family, possibly because Jay is Aaron’s student.

“What do you think of this place?” John asked them.

“It’s cool,” asserted Mason. With the non-committal vaguary I’d expect of a teenager.

“Weird as hell, but I like it,” said Jay, with enthusiam.

“How weird is Hell?” asked Aaron, and Jay, laughing, told him to shut up. Which is not how you treat your professor, either, but Aaron, nonplussed at first, shrugged and seemed to go with it.

We moved on.

At Charlie’s complex of blankets, I found the expected complex of relatives and in-laws. Charlie himself was deep in conversation with his sister, Mary, when we walked up and looked at me, briefly but did not speak. Mary’s son, Justice, and her daughter, June were there (Obviously a different June than my wife of the same name), along with their respective spouses—Mary’s other daughter, Maggie, wasn’t, but Maggie’s kids aren’t sprouts anymore. The sprouts themselves weren’t present, but June’s 15-year-old twins were, plus the boyfriend of one of the twins, plus Paul, Charlie’s nephew through his late brother, and Paul’s grown son, Jason. All of them, except Charlie and Mary, welcomed me and John into their picnic and their conversation, which quite typically was intellectual, convoluted, and jolly.

On the Silanos’ blankets, too, sat Steve Bees and his son, Sean. They were both fairly quiet, very obviously on the fringes of things. Steve looked a little uncomfortable, but then, he often does, these days.

“He’s being adopted,” explained June, seeing me look at Steve. Steve himself smiled nervously at me.

While we’d been walking and talking, the sky had started to cloud up, and since John and I had been talking with the Silano clan, the temperature had begun to drop, just a little. Charlie looked over at me and raised his eye-brows. I cleared my throat. The others looked at me.

“It’s going to rain,” I said. “Storm, actually. We have about fifteen minutes.”

“We should tell the others,” said Mary, starting to gather her things. I don’t know whether she trusts me so implicitly, or if she knew Charlie had prompted me and therefore shared my opinion. Either way, that a person could give an accurate weather prediction simply based on the feeling of the air she clearly took for granted.

I looked around and saw a shift in the movement of the picnickers all across the field, the way you can see a shift if you approach one of those puddles of massed ants (which I’ve always been told are ant wars, but I’ve never seen the ants in the mass actually fighting) and blow on it.

“They know,” I reported. “They’re packing up.”

“Where are we going to go?” asked Mary, though she sounded unconcerned.

“Chapel Hall, I imagine,” said Charlie, with a bit of an unexplained growl. “Or the Dinning Hall. They’re the only two places big enough. We’ll see where the self-organizing process takes us.” He was referring to a characteristic of complex systems, the idea being that the whole mass of us would exhibit a kind of herd consciousness and make a collective decision without any individual leadership. And so we did. Being tall, I could watch the process, to some extent. Groups of people initially milled about in multiple directions, appearing indecisive, until a general momentum built in the direction of the Dining Hall. Once that momentum became established, even those picnickers heading towards the Chapel turned around and came to the Dining Hall.

“I would have preferred the Chapel,” grumped Charlie.

“The ants go marching one by one…” I sang, and he glanced at me and smirked.

“You know too much to be entirely polite anymore, Daniel,” he told me.

“Yes,” I agreed, “but fortunately most people don’t know enough to understand what I’m talking about.”

“Be careful,” he warned me, “I have students all over here. So do you.”

And at almost precisely 15 minutes after I’d issued my warning, it began to pour. We could hear it on the Dining Hall roof. More importantly, about five minutes after that, a huge peal of thunder let me know we’d been right to come inside. I, for one, could have a picnic in the rain, though wet food can be a bit of a drag, but I draw the line at being struck by lightning.

The storm was a big one, the first really satisfying electrical storm of the year, and afterwards, well past sunset, we all went outside again and found somebody had managed to cover the Man (an effigy of straw and various invasive exotics Charlie wants to burn) with a tarp. We un-tarped it and set it on fire without much trouble, and as distant peals of thunder moved off towards the east, we danced the sun up, as per tradition.

As I start to really take seriously my ambition of maybe spending my life here, it occurs to me that what makes this school different from other schools is not that we study magic or any of the rest of it, but simply this. That at other schools, the main point is to prepare students for life in the wider world, and any sense of community within the institution is either an educational technique or an incidental byproduct of the collective effort at education. Here, the main point is to create the community.