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.
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.
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