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.
No comments:
Post a Comment