Happy Veteran's Day, I suppose.
We don't do anything for Veteran's Day, here, because the school year is over, the masters have retreated away from the school community, and the campus is quiet--as a school, we're not doing anything about anything until Yule. And there's the issue that patriotism itself isn't really much of a thing, here. A lot of the community members are pacifists of one kind or another, and many, whether they believe in violence or not, have little interest in mundane entities such as the United States of America.
But there are community members who have served--there are some serving now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there was a non-teaching master named Aurora in the first few years of the school who had retired after a career in the military. I think she did something or other in Korea, not combat, obviously, but something. And of course, Charlie's brother was a veteran. They should be acknowledged, somehow.
I think if Veteran's Day fell inside the school year and not outside it, Greg would do something, give some kind of talk.
Campus is particularly quiet, this year. Pretty much everybody except the yearlings and a few of the candidates are gone already. Chapel Hall is closed for the year, as is the Dining Hall, so the few of us who are left eat in the Great Hall and spend most of our time reading, hiking, or working on whatever catch-up projects we need to for this or that assignment while looking out the windows at the pale gray-brown and often-frozen world. The quiet is both metaphoric and literal.
And yet Eddie has a puppy.
Eddie, you may remember, doesn't have his master's vote to finish yet, despite his intention to receive his ring this coming Brigid. He hasn't asked for the vote because he feels he's not ready--he still hasn't recovered from the death of his dog, Elmo.
Maybe recovery isn't the right word. Integrated? Processed? Because Elmo didn't just die, he was shot by Joy after trying to kill Eddie--a crisis deliberately instigated by the masters, who assigned Eddie the task of training a dog he himself considered untrainable. He was set up to fail, in order to learn whatever he could from failure. And he hasn't learned it yet, so he says. He's stuck, not in grief, but in failure.
I'm unclear whether the masters couldn't offer useful help to Eddie, or of Eddie just didn't ask because he's so stuck, but either way, the school year ended without Eddie having any clear idea how to prepare himself to get his ring when he wants to. Steve asked him about it, and he reportedly shrugged.
"That's that," he said.
That's when Steve called a meeting of the candidate's group. Over the summer we pulled together to figure out how to get Steve and his wife and son out to visit a dying relative--that was the first time we acted as a problem-solving group. This was the second. We discussed how to get Eddie ready to receive his ring.
The thing is, besides Steve, there are four others who plan to finish on Brigid, and we all have our votes. That mean in theory, we should have everything it takes to be masters, including the ability to coach one of our own towards his ring.
Not that any of us had any idea what we are doing, but as Raven said, the actual masters didn't have any idea what they were doing when they started, either. So we gave it a shot.
We sat in a circle in the Great Hall, the eight of us, and talked and listened and threw around ideas, until Raven suggested the thing that clicked for all of us:
Eddie is stuck in the past, therefore he needs something to pull his attention into the present--and he's stuck in pain and therefore needs something to pull him towards joy. A puppy will accomplish both.
So now Eddie is fostering a puppy for one of the rescue centers he's worked with in the past. The pup has some medical needs and won't be up for adoption for a couple of months, so we're hoping Eddie can fall in love with the animal and then let her go on a happy note, and maybe that will help.
Maybe it won't. I'd never really appreciated before how uncertain, how vulnerable, this helping people is. But as Raven said, the actual masters are in the same boat, and what they do usually works out, so we're trying it.
And now Eddie has a puppy.
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