Nothing is certain but death and taxes, they say, and even death, it seems, is variable.
This year, they've added marigolds to the Samhain decorations.
Marigolds are those orange and yellow flowers that do well in late fall--they're also a big part of Dia del Muerte, which yearlings often think we celebrate around here, but we don't.
The issue is that Dia del Muerte is the Mexican Day of the Dead, not the neopagan one, and the difference matters for questions of cultural ownership. Like most things, this didn't make sense to me at first, but Steve Bees has explained it several times and I might be beginning to understand. It's not that we can't do anything that wasn't done by our own ancestors, it's that we can't take anything that wasn't given to us--and Dia del Muerte hasn't been given to us. We wouldn't know how to do it right.
It hasn't been given to us because nobody of Mexican cultural heritage has come here to give it. No one? I don't know if that's literally true, that NO ONE from that culture has ever been a student here. It seems hard to believe. I mean, the United States has a sizable Mexican-American population. But it's true that very few of them come here. It's odd, and it's another thing I didn't used to think about--if we're as welcoming and open-minded as we like to think we are around here, why are we so consistently white?
In any case, no, we don't celebrate Dia del Muerte. We celebrate our own Day of the Dead. And yet this year we had marigolds.
Marigolds in little pots on the tables of the Dining Hall, marigolds decorating the displays and alters of the Great Hall, and finally marigold petals sprinkled over the little wooden bowls lining the walkways of campus on Samhain Night, each bowl filled with water and a little floating candle, and the whole campus lit up like stars.
Another year over, a few more lives done. Hats off to dead folks, as we sing every year in the candle-lit Chapel, smelling of bees' wax and autumn leaves.
At the end of a ceremony, as I've said, the masters leave, abruptly, if necessary in the middle of a sentence, and while they all attend the reception out by the bonfire with us, they do not appear as masters again until Brigid. At least not officially. I caught Charlie in that gap, after they came down off the stage but before they vanished, and asked him whether next year was likely to be my last as a candidate and whether I needed to do anything over the winter about it.
"Cutting it a little tight, aren't you Daniel?" he asked me, with a half-smile.
"I'm not used to having this question," I admitted.
"We'll talk later," he told me. "I'll find you." And then the bells rang and he left.
But before they rang, Allen found me. He was evidently looking for me, and on finding me he grasped my shoulder and fixed me with a knowing look. Then he smiled and turned away, off to find somebody else at the last moment, perhaps.
Then we all streamed out, on our way to the bonfire, and I dropped back a little, stepped off to the side, and vanished. I can't quite go invisible as well as Allen can, but I'm working on it. If I'm outdoors, especially in poor light, I can generally place myself where others do not look, and I decided I wanted to watch the sprouts in their annual abduction--they take an adult, usually one of the masters, though anybody but a yearling will do, and hold the unfortunate for ransom, paid in candy and expanded privileges. Here trick-or-treat is rather more like trick-and-treat. They took me once, but it was kind of hard to figure out what was going on as the victim of the procedure.
So I stepped off to the side, and with my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see bodies, large and small, moving along, outlined by flickers of light from the distant bonfire and the occasional flare of a flashlight. As the crowd pouring from Chapel Hall stretched out, I saw the smallest bodies move in and cluster. I expected to see somebody go down in the middle of the cluster. I didn't.
Instead I heard a whisper, though I could not make out the words and decided to move nearer. I learned later that the whispering voice said "Mr. Greg, don't talk, we've caught you."
After the rest of the crowd had walked on by, the children spread out something on the ground and asked Greg to sit down on it.
"You bandits are seldom so considerate. To what do I owe this unaccustomed courtesy?" Greg asked, almost whispering himself.
"It's 'cause you're old, now," said a very young sprout. "We don't want to break you by accident."
"Little ghoul, I've been old since before you were born," he said, sounding both stern and amused.
"Yeah, but now you're older," said one of the others. "Please, no more talking. We've kidnapped you."
And they tied his hands and feet, laid him down, and did something else to him that I couldn't see. When one of them ran off to negotiate, I worked my way around back to the fire.
"Oh, Daniel, I thought they'd taken you," said Kit, quietly. "You haven't escaped, have you?"
Escaping would be bad form.
"They didn't take me, I spied on them," I explained.
"Ah. What did you see?"
"I won't tell, spy on them yourself next time," I said.
And then the sprout appeared, costumed as some sort of animal, and announced they'd taken Greg, so we all did our part begging and pleading for his return and then finally negotiated and agreed to pay the ransom. When they carried Greg out I saw they had not only carried him in an old hammock, because they had bound his feet, they'd also wrapped him in an old blanket and tied him in there. They had drawn all sorts of things on that blanket with a red marker, making their victim look ridiculous, as they normally do, and added a few leaves for decoration. We had to un-tie him.
"Why the blanket?" asked Charlie.
"They didn't want me to get cold," said Greg. "Didn't June complain of being cold last year?"
"Well aren't you getting special treatment?"
"It's because they think I'm old."
"You are old."
"They are intelligent children."
So we had fun eating and drinking around the fire for the rest of the evening, a big group of us, nearly two hundred strong, counting everybody on campus and several visitors and allies who had come in for the occasion.
Towards the end, Allen found me again.
"Did you appreciate my goodbye?" He asked. I had. Very much.
"I thought that's what you might be doing," I said.
"Given that we're talking now," he said, "what of me did you say goodbye to? Are you sure you're ready to be only my friend and not also my student?"
And, you know, he's right.
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