Afterward: Post 2: Research and Insults

After Charlie told me of his diagnosis, my first reaction was to head to the woods. I wanted comfort, I wanted perspective, and I wanted solitude--I'm not inherently a loner, but I didn't want to deal with other people's emotions just then, especially not their emotions about my emotions. I wanted everything simple while I sorted out the inside of my head.

I had my uniform, my camping hammock, and my water bottle in my car, so I changed my clothes, borrowed an extra cloak for added warmth, called my wife's voicemail, and headed uphill to my spot in the woods.

Somebody followed me.

I was aware of my tail because I could hear birds reacting to a second person and because the leaves, just starting to fall, made the trail noisy. I could not see anybody, and when I stepped off the trail behind a tree and waited nobody caught up. I therefore concluded that somebody was trying to tail me in secret, and that the person could not possibly be Charlie because he would have known I'd notice the birds and the leaf-noise. Yet who else would have reason to follow me without my knowledge, except someone worried about my mental state and respectful of my solitude?

"Tell Charlie I'm going to my spot for the night. I'll be down in the morning. I'm OK," I called out.

"OK," replied a distant voice I couldn't recognize, and the birds reported someone's passage back down the mountain.

Really, I felt touched.

I didn't sleep much that night, nor did I really do much of what could be called thinking. My mind wandered in dark, unhelpful, and seemingly random directions, and by morning the edge of my shock had worn off and I could pull myself together.

I think it must have been around nine in the morning--breakfast was over, people were heading to class--when I came back into the main part of campus and found Charlie under the avenue of maple trees that lead past the Dining Hall. He was raking leaves.

Nobody ever raked leaves on campus, the idea being to leave fallen leaves in place to shelter over-wintering insects and to enrich the soil under the trees. I had almost forgotten we had any leaf rakes, though the landscaping crew did pick up leaves from some neighboring properties to make mulch. And yet here was Charlie, raking.

I stopped to watch him. He glanced up at me a moment, without stopping in his work.

"If this is going to be my final autumn," he explained, "I might as well enjoy it." And he dropped the rake and jumped into the pile, then covered himself up to his chin in dry, fragrant leaved.

I jumped in after him.

"Who invited you?" he protested, but I could tell he didn't mean it.

"I did," I retorted. "I wear the Green Ring, too, now, I don't need you to tell me what to do."

"You're a cocky upstart."

"You're a grumpy old man," I replied. And just for a moment, I saw his eyes twinkle.

"Oh yeah?" he said, and threw a handful of leaves at me.

"Yeah!" I threw leaves at him.

"Get out! Go!" more leaves.

"Make me!" And with that we were wrestling, tussling semi-seriously like puppies or like little boys, each trying to pin or push out the other.

I had never wrestled Charlie before, but I had a fairly good idea of what it should have been like. I remembered his hunting bow, which I could barely draw, and his beautiful physical prowess with a chainsaw. I remembered how he had unobtrusively dropped into a martial arts "ready" posture that time he thought I might hit him, and I knew he'd had at least some training. I had seven inches on him and I was over four decades younger, but he should have been able to beat me. Had we wrestled six months earlier, I'm sure he would have. Now, I was clearly stronger than he.

If I pressed my advantage and beat him, he'd be humiliated, I was sure. But if I let him beat me, he would know and would likewise be humiliated. I disengaged and switched weapons.

"You ass-clown, fighting over a leaf pile?" I half-shouted.

"You self-important tyro, fighting back!" He followed my lead.

"Idiot!"

"Fool!"

"Nincompoop!"

"Twat-waffle!"

"Egg-head!"

"Shit-for-brains!"

"Ass-munch!"

And so we dueled. The rules were simple and intuitive, each of us trying to top the other in poetry and invention of insult. We used only insults that might occur to children--nothing political and nothing sexual. In retrospect, "ass-munch" could be taken as a reference to oral-anal sex, and "dick-breath," which also got a mention, could be taken in a similar spirit, but that didn't occur to me at the time, and I don't think it occurred to Charlie, either. We were innocent.

I was then in my early 30's, and not even with my brother could I be a boy among boys anymore, yet with Charlie, a man old enough to be my grandfather, I could. He sometimes took leave of his age and responsibilities and took me with him.

We quickly ran through our remembered repertoire of standards and started making things up. My favorite of my own inventions, and the only one I now remember, was "you poor excuse for a cheese sandwich!" It made him laugh. But the ring that made us peers did not make us equals, and he was far better at language than I. I started to reach, to have trouble keeping up.

Finally he came out with "You tiny Tater Tot of snot!" and I folded.

"I got nothin," I admitted.

"Damn right," he agreed, and tossed another little handful of leaves.

I let myself fall back into the pile and stretched out, looking at the yellow and orange trees above us, so bright they almost hurt my eyes.

"I'm going to miss you," I exclaimed, as though he were merely planning to move permanently to Paris or something.

"Me, too, Daniel, me too," he replied in a similar tone.

It was only later that I realized how truly strange that reply was. Did he mean, as I initially assumed, that he would miss me? A reciprocal statement of personal fondness? But Charlie, as far as I know, did not believe in an afterlife, so how did he expect to miss me after he died? And it would be unlike him not to notice that what he'd actually said was that he'd miss himself, so maybe that's what he meant, but that's an even more metaphysically bizarre statement.

Later, I went home, called my wife at work, called Allen, spoke to his voicemail, and got online. I typed "pancreatic cancer" in to a search engine.

Turned out most of what I'd thought I knew about cancer, and that cancer in particular, was wrong.

When Charlie had spoken of fighting and yet described himself as dying, I had assumed he meant he would try for a cure but expected to fail. I had thought of cancer treatment as a very either/or thing; either you try to cure cancer, or you accept hospice care. Turns out, there is a third option.

With terminal diagnoses, which is what stage 4 pancreatic cancer is, they try to extend your life and keep its quality high. With pancreatic cancer, the standard was, at the time, anyway, to use small doses of chemotherapy to make the patient more comfortable without producing debilitating side-effects. Charlie never talked about his treatment with me, but everything I saw over the following months--the rest of his life--was consistent with that course of treatment. He never lost his hair, but his energy and apatite waned and then waxed again over the course of every week...but I'm getting ahead of myself. Whether he also ever fought for a cure, I don't know.

What I found online also explained something else--how had Charlie not gotten to stage 4 without a diagnosis? I'd have figured him to be very proactive about his health. I'd even thought that maybe he'd been sick for months or years without telling me. I mean, he didn't tell me much about himself anyway. But it turns out that pancreatic cancer usually has no symptoms until it metastasizes, at which point it's incurable....

I read for a couple of hours and totally depressed myself until June came home. Then Allen called me back. I'd called him in order to find out more about how the school was handling things and maybe to talk over my own reaction, but for the first time Allen couldn't help me with anything. He just fell apart on me.

I remember thinking that this wasn't how this part of my life--a newly-minted master--was supposed to go.

Afterword: Post 1: Diagnosis

So the story is finished and yet it is not complete. You’ll want to know how I came to write this blog, for one thing. I’ve been referring to the closing of the school, and you’ll want to know how and why that happened, too, and maybe you’ll have noticed that I’m a member of the Six but have not explained how or why.

In short, I’ve brought my story up to a happy ending in February of 2010, but not up to the spring of 2012, when I made my first disjointed attempts at blog-writing (and started giving you equally disjointed hints as to the state of our community now), and some pretty heavy things must have gone on during the gap. You want to know what.

Fair enough.

I’m curious as to how much you’ve guessed? I haven’t meant to drop hints, but as I suspect you’ve noticed I am not the most disciplined or organized of writers, and I’ve let a few things slip. For example, I have not been able to bring myself to lie and refer to Charlie in the present tense.

Yes, one of the things that happened during those missing two-and-a-quarter years was the illness and death of my teacher—I still don’t like writing those words, especially not since some of you may not have realized and so for you, and for me when I wrote to you, he was alive until fifteen seconds ago. I suppose I could have waited, at let it be a surprise for you at its proper place in the narrative, but honestly you would not have been waiting very long because his diagnosis was almost the first piece of school-related news I received after earning my Ring, and his diagnosis was terminal from the start. The only doubt was how long that termination would take and how it would go.

Of course, here is where Charlie would grump (and here is where the part of Charlie that he gave to me does grump) that life is a sexually transmitted terminal condition, and that the only real uncertainty is always how long we have and what we will do in the time we get.

The other events I have to relate are related to that one, but not directly triggered by it, and I’ll get to them in their turn.

In a way, of course, Charlie’s death was a predictable part of the story, whether I slipped up and dropped hints or not, simply because of how I’ve chosen to structure the tail. Charlie always referred to the art of storytelling—and story composition—as “sectioning reality.” He was referring to conic sections, a group of two-dimensional figures that can be derived by slicing a cone: a slice perpendicular to the cone’s long axis yields a circle; a slice slightly off the perpendicular yields an ellipse, or, if it intersects the flat bottom of the cone, a hyperbola; a slice parallel to the long axis yields a parabola; and a slice along the long axis yields a triangle. Such different shapes, and they are all true two-dimensional approximations of the same three-dimensional shape. Similarly, since a story must also be a radical simplification of reality, multiple seemingly incompatible stories can all be derived from the same real events and yet all be true (doesn’t mean all stories are true, though; you can’t derive a square from a cone without lying). And I’ve chosen to section these particular events largely as a story about a teacher, and these are almost always elegiac in the end.

I mean stories about teachers from the viewpoint of the student. The natural and expected-if-not-universal of these is that the teacher dies, the same way that the natural and expected end of a romance is happily-ever-after. Why is this? I thought, for a while, that it was because only when a teacher dies do former students get moony enough to want to write an idealized account of the person. After getting to know Charlie, I guessed that maybe teachers usually object to being put on pedestals and so forth, and that students therefore can’t get away of much in the way of tributes until the teacher is safely out of the way. But neither explanation applies to people like Yoda, who are figments of their author’s imagination from the start.

I think now, rather, that the answer depends on a curious fact; at what point can you tell that the teacher has succeeded? At the point when the student no longer needs him or her. And how better can you prove, as a storyteller, that the point has been reached but to say that the teacher is no longer available, has died?

Except, I still feel like I need Charlie, and here I am without him—except for the grumpy, intelligent, and sarcastic voice in my head. That I appear able to keep.

As I mentioned before, I’m not going to tell these final stories journal style, as though reporting on the events o the week as they happened. Most of them played out far too slowly, with weeks going by between major plot points, and some of them played out far too fast, or overlapped in time with others. Then, too, I was not living on campus during those months and years, so there were long stretches of time when I had no clear idea what was happening at school at all.

So I’m going to try a more novelistic structure, where each section covers the time period that it must, short or long, on order to deliver a narrative or thematic unit (oh, god, I’m talking like an English textbook….). I don’t know how many posts this is going to take, but I’m hoping for eight and a nice congruence with the structure of the rest of the blog.

Here goes.

So, June and I moved out about a week after I earned my ring. We moved into a three-bedroom apartment carved out of the back of an old farmhouse. The owner lives in the front half and there’s a nice yard, which we agreed to henceforth take care of in exchange for a very good deal on the rent. It’s within biking distance—albeit a very long biking distance—of campus, some basic shopping, and the landscaping company Charlie used to own and where I still work (had I said before that he used to own it? He did—the friend of his who has owned it the whole time I’ve been around was his business partner). June can carpool to work.

We had to buy bikes, of course, since we can’t use the campus bikes all the time anymore, and we decided to buy a car, too. Cars are hard to avoid. We learned to eat from the store. We had utility payments. What all did to our carbon footprints I hated to think. I let my boss, the landscaper, know that I’d be available for a full fifty hours a week in the season, rather than my traditional twenty, and I pursued work as a writing coach for high school and college students, and so I prepared to earn my way in the world.

I made no attempt to find work as a paid ally at school because while I had demonstrated that I could be a useful employee there, so had lots of other people, and we couldn’t all be employees. I planned to wait for an actual opening, and I made my peace with the fact that one might never come. I believed myself to be competent, but not superlative, so I figured I’d just always be beaten out by the competition.

Months went by in which I rarely visited campus and I interacted with the people who lived there almost as rarely. I may have been trying to establish myself emotionally as well as physically without them, but the school is no insular, so different from everything else, that it can be difficult to get across without a determined effort of will. I saw Allen, Kit, and Steve occasionally—I was pleased to hear that Steve was making steady progress towards ring—but Charlie does not really socialize. I exchanged a few short emails with him only. I planned to return for sabbats, but for one reason or another I didn’t, not even for Lammas, so I didn’t get to find out what the masters do in the Mansion on that day (though I have since experienced it, and will tell you). Life went on and started to feel normal. June and I talked about maybe starting a family.

And then….

On a beautiful fall day in early October, Charlie texted me. He’d only recently gotten a cell phone, holding out even after all the other Masters had them, but I’d heard that lately he’d taken to using the technology to issue edicts. From what I’d gathered, this one was typical;

Come to campus today. Ch.

The “Ch” was a signature. After a lifetime of writing letters, Charlie could not help signing his texts.

I had planned to spend the day doing yard work, but there was no arguing; Charlie had turned his cell phone off. I had no idea what Charlie wanted or how long I’d be gone, but I keep a “bag for anywhere” packed for adventure or emergency, so I just wrote a note for my wife, changed into my uniform, and went—driving, not biking, as the day was far advanced by then.

When I found Charlie he was digging in the front bed, kneeling on a foam pad to save his knees and his uniform pants. He was in almost exactly the same place and position as he had been when I first asked to help him garden, over ten years before, a coincidence that struck me, for some reason, as eerie. He looked old. Of course, Charlie had a right to look old; he was almost seventy-three, but I had never thought of him that way before. Was it only the juxtaposition of the present with memory, or had he really aged a decade or more in the months since I had seen him last? I put the thought from me as he stood to greet me and dusted off his knees.

“Walk with me, Daniel,” he said, with no preamble. So we walked, strolled casually out onto the Flat Field towards the Edge of the World, and he politely asked me about my wife, my parents, and my writing. I answered as briefly as I could, as I knew he had not asked me there to make small-talk. When we reached the Edge, he finally got to the point.

“Daniel, I’m dying,” he said, and the bottom dropped out of my mind.

His voice was businesslike, unsentimental, and I just looked at him. He took my looking as a question, and answered me.

“I have pancreatic cancer. Stage four. My doctors think I have about three, maybe six months to live, with treatment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fighting this, but I don’t think I’m going to win. Everybody has to die of something, and I think this one may be mine.”

I said nothing, and again he continued as though responding to me.

“I need you to take my spring classes. You don’t have to take all of them, there are other people I can ask, and if I can I’ll help you. Rick is taking over groundskeeping, and you can help each other. But I want you to take over as many as you can. I can’t think of anyone more qualified.”

I could not speak. My mind was a mess of competing emotions such that I could not express any of them. I just looked at him. It was such a beautiful day, that day, and he looked so at home in it, his face nearly expressionless, he short, gray hair somewhat mussed by the breeze, his eyes—and I had never noticed this before—the same color blue as the sky behind him. He was so incontrovertibly alive. I could not help it; I hugged him.

It was the only time we ever embraced, and he was stiff, at first, then hugged me back warmly. His body felt too thin—still strong in a muscular sense, but already bony to the point of frailty. His hair smelled like fresh fall leaves. When we disengaged he looked guarded for a moment, searching my eyes, perhaps, for traces of pity. He patted my arm, then turned to walk back to the mansion. We spoke of ordinary things, how many chicks the phoebes in the car port had fledged that year, which of the migratory birds had already left, and so forth. It was gossip to him. It was current events. Charlie did not watch TV, and I had learned he no longer read newspapers. I couldn’t tell if he had taken my hug as an answer to his request, or if he had simply assumed I would do as he told me—I always had. as his student. Maybe he just knew I was in no position to think. When we got back to the beds he excused himself.

“I may be dying, but I still have things I need to do. And you need to go meditate, or whatever it is you do these days.”

I took my leave as though the day were still ordinary, and walked back to my car. But I did not get in. My bag for anywhere was in the back seat. I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be, except where I was. I called my wife, relieved to get her voicemail so I didn’t have to deal with her response to my news just yet. Then I grabbed my bag and headed to the office to ask Sharon for the loan of an extra cloak for warmth. When I told her to tell Charlie I’d take his classes, all of them, she merely thanked me and said we’d make arrangements right after Brigid—but her eyes filled with tears. Then I left, headed uphill to my spot among the trees, my need for it itself a tribute to my teacher.

Mastery Year 3: Part 8: Post 8: The Day After the End

Yes, I graduated. I earned my ring--it's on my finger now, the ring finger of my right hand. My wedding ring occupies my left. Which finger a person wears the green ring on varies--Charlie wears his on his left, a personal symbol of who and what he's married to. So does Greg, incidentally. I've never been clear on whether Greg is formally celibate, but he at least sized his ring with the expectation that he'd never marry. Anyway, it feels a bit strange to wear this, to have it and everything it means in common with Charlie and Greg and the others.

When the Brigid ceremony ended, I processed off the stage with the other masters (!) without clearly knowing where we were going. We ended up in a classroom just outside of the Chapel. Charlie closed the door and looked at the five of us newbies with a mischievous glint.

"Anybody wanna know what we do after that ceremony?" he said. We didn't quite shout "me! me!" like pre-schoolers, but that was the mood in the room.

"We're going to bless the sugar maple trees," he explained. "And the trees generally, all of them on campus. And it's gonna be cold, so if you want to go back to your dorms to get an extra layer, I'd get going. Meet us in the Formal Gardens."

"I've never seen new masters in the dorms Brigid night," said Raven, sounding a little uncertain. Wanting to keep to the proper ritual of it all, I suppose.

"That's why you've got to go now," Charlie explained. "While they're all eating." The students all have a small feast in the Chapel itself after the ceremony, rather than going back to the Great Hall to eat together. Now I know why.

"I was out walking most of the day," I said. "And I was fine. Has it gotten a lot colder while we've been in here?"

Charlie shook his head. Of course he'd been inside just as we had, but I accepted his authority on the subject, and it only took me a moment to figure out how he knew; it had been clouding up earlier. Cloudy skies trap heat at night. If the clouds had cleared so quickly, it could only have been a front moving through, and even in the Chapel, we would have heard the wind.

What it takes is not only noticing things, but finding them significant enough to think about, think through.

We all decided we were warm enough, and so we and the other masters all followed Charlie out. He seemed to be in charge, a role I don't normally see him play among the masters, but there he was. He carried a bag with him.

We went, not to the Formal Garden, which had been simply a convenient semi-private meeting place near the dorms, but to the avenue of sugar maples along the main entrance way.

Those trees were planted long ago as a stately avenue, two single-file rows of trees, but now they are simply the oldest members of a small grove that Charlie has allowed to grow from their seedlings. Some of them are getting pretty big. He opened his bag and handed out thermoses of something--syrup-sweetened herbal tea, I think, nothing alcoholic--and led us through a small ceremony in which we sang to the trees and drank toasts to them. We then went down the avenue and more briefly toasted every single one that is large enough for us to tap. Of course, the sugaring season, the first harvest of the year, is about to begin.

At the end of the avenue we raised yet another toast to the whole group. Then we set off on a circuit of the campus as Charlie took us to visit and greet one representative member of each woody species on campus.

It took a long time, and yes, we got cold. The whole affair would probably have been more festive if we'd had alcohol to drink, frankly, but at least the tea was hot, and as we got hungrier and hungrier, and eventually more and more tired, we all got giddy and goofy stone cold sober.

Each tree had its own verse of our song, plus a repeating chorus, and there were special words to say for the toasts, and all of it seemed very new and a little complicated to the five of us, but I can see how all of it could become as easy and natural-seeming as any holiday tradition.

And when we'd at last visited every representative tree on campus, we stood in the snow near the edge of the world and sang the whole song through, beginning to end, dancing a complicated circle dance that seemed designed to accommodate a few dancers who didn't know what they were doing.

Then, standing there under a thick, cloudy sky, panting a little in the cold air and wondering what would come next, I heard Charlie speak:

"Anyone else half-frozen here, or is it just me?"

We all admitted we were, indeed, frozen.

"Then let's get the hell inside."

For some reason that was really funny. Allen gaffawed. Karen giggled. The rest of us various tittered and smirked. And so, laughing, we stumbled back to the Mansion, went up the secret stair, and into the masters' dorm where Mia--who had not gone out to wassail the trees with us--had a feast prepared. We had hot chocolate, roasted nuts, pancakes with maple syrup and fruit preserves, eggnog, and, finally once we were warm again, peppermint-flavored ice cream with more syrup and nuts and fruit. The milk for all this came, I am told, from canned evaporated milk put up from our own sheep the year before. We were deliberately finishing up the last of our dairy, our egg, and our maple syrup to demonstrate our trust that in the coming new year, we'd get more.

June was there. She'd been invited up because family of masters have the same access masters do. Actually, Lo, Kit's husband, of course Cuppa Joe, and various sprouts were there, too, including my small relatives (my brother and sister-in-law were not, though they were invited--they had something else to do and had dropped the kids off with Lo for the sleep-over). It was a big party, and all of us stayed up very late, even the sprouts.

There was a room full of bunk beds. Allen explained that we could sleep there whenever we visited campus.

"This is your place, now. You can come and go as you like, and you can bring whomever you like, except students. You can tell anything to anybody you like, use your judgment. It's just as good as ours, now. You're us."

"We trust you," added Charlie.

The next morning, June and I moved our stuff upstairs and I stood in my room there in my student dorm for a long time, saying goodbye to it. We have an apartment picked out already and our paperwork is signed. Our move-in day is Thursday.

That afternoon, at lunch (back in the Dining Hall, with yet another generation of newly-arrived yearlings milling around with their buddies looking confused) Charlie invited me upstairs to his room to have a drink. The drink turned out to be plain water, of course.

I sat on the edge of his bed, which looks like and probably is a used exam table from a doctor's office or a physical therapy place, hard and narrow, and he sat in a swivel chair by his desk. We talked, though not of anything of obvious import. We were just hanging out.

After a while, he picked up his tin whistle from his desk and started fidgeting idly with it.

"I have mine here," I commented. "It's with my stuff in the other room."

"What can you play?" he asked.

 I shrugged.

"I don't know. Anything, if I learn it, I suppose."

And so I fetched my tin whistle, and he taught me to play a duet version of "Uncle John's Band."

The same song Allen had strummed on his guitar for us on the secret beach when I was a yearling, so long ago.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here ends my story, though not this blog. I have an Afterward, of sorts, explaining what happened to lead me to start this blog in the first place and generally getting you up to date. I'm not sure how many posts it will take to cover the material, perhaps three or four, maybe more. It won't be episodic in structure--events played out over months, not weeks, and I was rarely on campus. In any case, stay tuned.
-D.

Mastery Year 3: Part 8: Post 7: Brigid

The day dawns when everything changes: Brigid.

I woke the morning before Brigid--what would be the morning of Brigid except that our holidays begin with the evening, as do those of Jews--feeling very odd. The sunlight was very bright in my room, I'd slept late, but June was sleeping still later, so I lay there alone beside her in a kind of well-lit, exalted terror, without thinking much of anything, aware only of the Total Now.

The Total Now, of course, doesn't last very long. You think "ah, here is the Total Now," and then, just like that, it isn't. Thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, creep in. I'm not enlightened. I'm not even all that different from the doofus who came to this school so many years ago, with no clear plan but a vague desire to belong to a place that looked like a scene from Harry Potter. And yet much has shifted since then, and I knew without doubt that I'd earned the ring I'd be getting later that day. It was simply the enormity of a day longed for, worked for, daydreamed about for so long finally arriving that weirded me out.


As you may have noticed, I can talk myself into a state very easily.

June woke up. I can't tell you how I knew she woke up, as she didn't move, but I did know, as so I said "Today is The Day."

"So is every other day," she reminded me. "Have we missed breakfast? Is there coffee?"

We hadn't missed breakfast completely, but it was well in progress by the time we got down to it and some people were already trickling out, finished, which was just as well because the morning before Brigid is always very crowded--almost the entire campus has returned from winter break, but we're still eating in the Great Hall, all of us except the masters and, of course, the graduating novices. They, the ones graduating, are all in the utter, timeless blackness of the individual cells of The Ordeal, a fact which nobody ever notices until their own Ordeal begins. Once one knows about the Ordeal, the sudden absence of twenty or so people for three days is obvious, but those who don't know to look never see. I've often wondered whether that curious obliviousness is cured by training for mastery, if our ability to see things that were once invisible--and, for some of us, to become invisible ourselves--translates into an ability to see what we're actually seeing instead of only what we're looking for. Perhaps it doesn't, but as they don't play such mind games with candidates I don't really know. Anyway, breakfast was crowded.

After breakfast, June and I went for a very long walk together. It hasn't snowed in over a week, and there's been some melting, so there were plenty of trampled paths almost everywhere we wanted to go, and even elsewhere, up in the woods, the snow was not deep. The air temperature hovered around freezing, warm for this time of year. The sun flitted between quickly-moving, fleecy clouds.

Do you know, I can't think of a time anyone here has ever remarked on whether Punxsutawney Phill has seen his shadow?

We got back to the Mansion around two and had lunch. Then I left June to her own devices for the rest of the day, took a shower, and put on my uniform. By three I was waiting in the Great Hall with the other graduating candidates, as instructed.

"We're supposed to go up, now," said Raven, "as long as no one can see us go."

No one else was in the Great Hall at the moment, so we climbed the stairs, up one flight, two flights, three flights, and then, after looking around one more time to assure ourselves of having no witnesses, we climbed the fourth flight up to the Masters' floor and Raven knocked on the door.

Allen answered, and bowed us inside.

I hadn't been up there since my first year, when I was on the janitorial team. The others had never been on that team, so they had never been up there at all. It looked about as I remembered it--quiet, simple, and somewhat cramped, but every object a work of art, and most of them gifts from students over the years. The interior lights were off, and only a little indirect sunlight drifted into the hallway from one or two open suit doors. No one seemed to be about. Allen gestured for silence and directed us into a side room I'd never seen before. It had always been closed when I'd come up to clean.

The room had no windows. It was entirely interior. Inside it were narrow shelves along the walls of evidently symbolic knick-knacks, tall, heavy vases set on the floor filled with dry plant stems and other items, a small round table, much candle-light, and the Six.

A seventh master stood around the table also, a woman I didn't know, an ally

We hadn't been coached on the contents of the ritual, only its purpose, so we all stood in a clump by the door and waited to be told what to do. Allen closed the door behind us and went to join the others, all six of them standing in a ring around the table, but a step  or two back from it.

"Here is where we make masters," said Kit. "Enter the Circle, if you wish."

We all stepped between the masters and made a smaller ring around the table within theirs. On the table lay various ritual implements and symbolic objects, several of the candles lighting the room, five brown cloth belts each rolled in a tight spiral, and a small bowl containing five green rings. I couldn't take my eyes from that bowl until Kit again began to speak. Then I looked at her.

"Identify yourselves vocally--who are you?" she asked.

We each said our names.

"You know who we are," she said, but then said her name anyway, and each of the others said theirs. The ally named herself as Mia. Ebony now knew not only who was in the room but where each person stood in relation to her, just as we knew. Details can be important in rituals, but they are only important if you know what they are.

"What do you want?" Kit asked.

"Our rings," we chorused in clumsy, unrehearsed unison.

"We have them for you," she acknowledged, "but there are things that must be said and done first." She then made a speech about the reason for the ritual and the meaning of the ring and the purposes of the school, all of which we had known already--just as they had known our names already--but the speech served a second purpose; Kit wove into it a detailed description of how the room looked. Ebony smiled.

"If you take these rings," Kit continued, "you must first swear to uphold the values of our community, the welfare of the school, and the welfare of the students, to the best of your ability forever. This step is not one you take for yourselves but for others. You can use what we gave you freely and anywhere, but if you accept the ring it will be because you wish to serve the community and its students. Do you swear?"

I think we all paused a little, just to be sure--it does not do to take major vows by rote--but we all swore. Then Mia spoke up.

"There is another vow you must make if you want the rings," she said, "but the Six can't ask it of you because it is to serve them, not as your masters, for we are all equals, but as your wards. They give their lives to this community, giving up the possibility of outside careers and achievements commensurate with their skills, and they are the only ones who make this sacrifice--even the non-teaching masters can put their work here on their resumes and leave at any time. Our job, yours and mine, is to make sure they never have cause to regret it. Should this school ever close, or should one of the Six have to leave us for any reason, we others who wear the Ring are responsible, individually and collectively, for making sure no one who has been of the Six will ever go hungry or suffer neglect. Do you swear?"

Again, after a pause, we all swore. I had expected the first vow, though I hadn't known the wording, but I had not thought about the second. It felt odd to make that vow, to imagine each of these people, as well as those few who had been of the Six but had left and were still alive, ill or infirm and in need, and what I might do to fulfill my vow. A quiet sense of responsibility settled on me--and a strange, new tenderness.

"We will each of us bless your rings," explained Kit, leaning forward to pick up the bowl. They passed it around the outer circle, each of the Six taking a  moment to place a hand over the rings and concentrate before passing the bowl along.

"You're all of different ring sizes," Kit said, "so you shouldn't have any trouble finding the one that's yours. Take your rings, but don't put them on. Daniel, you're biggest, why don't you go first?"

I took the bowl and sorted through the rings, found the largest of them, and took it. Then I looked around, trying to sort out who was next-biggest. It would be Raven or Veery, I knew. Both Ebony and Eddie have little hands. Raven waved as though volunteering, to I handed her the bowl. It took her longer to find her ring--she had to lay them out in a row on the table--because she's closer in size to the others than I am. She put the other three back in the bowl still in a line and passed the bowl to Veery, who took it and passed it to Eddie, who laughed silently and took the smallest ring, then passed the bowl to Ebony who has slightly bigger hands than he does.

Looking at least of them in turn like that, I felt a tremendous pride to be doing this with such a remarkable group of people, as well as an amused awareness that I stood in a circle with not one but two of my ex-girlfriends. I thought about Joanna and wondered how she was doing. Well, I hope.

We each held our rings. Mine felt cool and smooth and surprisingly light in my hands.

"Bless your rings however you will--make them yours" Kit instructed, "and then hand your ring to the master who will present to you."

I handed mine across the table to Charlie, who took it without comment or overt expression, then nodded slightly. I nodded back, though I'm not sure why.

Raven handed hers to Charlie, and Veery handed hers to Allen. Eddie handed his to Joy, who smiled warmly at him. Ebony seemed a little lost--she has poor spatial awareness and had probably forgotten where in the circle Allen was.

"Put out your hand, Ebony," he said, and she did and he took her hand and so she gave him her ring.

"There," said Kit. "Now is when you change--your belts, I mean."

You may or may not remember, but the color of our clothing has significance, here. Novices where white uniforms with black cloaks, and everybody else wears brown uniforms with brown cloaks, except that the masters have brown cloth belts while the candidates (and other graduates without rings, when they visit) wear white belts.

Each of us reached out and took the belt in front of us, removed our white belts and tied the brown ones on. The belts are just like those you'd wear in a martial arts class, only perhaps a little narrower, and in martial arts classes when you switch belts you turn away from your teacher--or at least, that's what Karen had us do. Something about not changing your clothes in full view. Now, though, with our teachers surrounding us in a ring, there was no turning away. I felt a little self-conscious about that.

Now, for the first time, Greg spoke up, saying "come to Chapel Hall like normal, and sit in the front row. You'll come up on stage, as you recall--Charlie's students, then Allen's, then Joy's. If you have any questions about that, stay back and ask. Otherwise you're free to go, but you're between things right now, with brown belts but without your rings, and the ritual won't be closed until tonight. So I suggest you avoid mixing with the others or attempting anything psychologically strenuous. Good luck."

Allen spoke a kind of benediction over us, saying "Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." It sounds very Zen and ancient, but it's actually lyrics from a Leonard Cohen song.

We filed out. The masters came out after us. Kit extinguished the candles. Once we were out of the room, I caught Charlie.

"Which of us will go first?" I asked him. Raven heard and came over, also curious.

"Which of you wants to?" he asked. She and I looked at each other and shrugged.

"I can," I said.

"Good. You remember what to say?"

"Yes."

"OK. Raven, you want to say anything different, or does the standard work for you?"

There's a dialogue that people getting their rings go through, and the first one who does it every year must always do it the same way. The others can improvise. Raven chose not to improvise.

It was almost four by then. I occupied myself for two hours by wandering around the lesser-used parts of campus and up into the woods again. The temperature was dropping. The sky was growing a high, thickening haze.

At dusk I went to the Chapel and sat down in the front row. Eddie was already there. The others came in a few minutes later. We all sat together bit did not speak. The room filled up behind us.

The ceremony went as it had before. This post is already plenty long enough, so I won't give a full description. When it was time, Charlie stood at center stage and waited. I joined him.

"What do you seek?" he asked me.

"I seek my Mastery," I told him.

"Why do you seek it?"

"Because it is mine."

"Take then this ring from my hand. It is already yours. Congratulations." And he handed me my ring. I put it on. That was it, the heart of the matter. He shook my hand, the other heart of the matter, and I took my seat on the stage among the other masters and looked out at the audience, the students, and I let them look at me.

Everything changes every day. It is always today. It is always Brigid.