Samhain

Happy Samhain, everyone!

Though I admit is is a bit creepy to be celebrating the Day of the Dead right after such a frighteningly dangerous hurricane. It makes honoring the dead seem very real. We are ok here, though there are some areas in our town that flooded...I don't want to say too much and give away clues as to where I am. For various reasons, I do not want the places I talk about to be easy to find. There are things I want to talk about today, to continue my narrative, but before I get into that let me just say that I hope all my readers are ok, and that those who are not ok (whether they read my blog or not!) are in my thoughts and prayers.

So, back to my story...or my continuing information-dump, as it has become. I've decided to continue as I have begun until late January or so, when my second attempt at this blog will begin as a true narrative, showing you, not telling you, what the school was like. But in the mean-time those of you who have been reading me get a sneak-peak, as it were, of this world I am trying to describe. And along the way you'll get tidbits that probably won't be in the next version, like the Moon Man post, or the fact that this year Samhain is poignant for me in a way that next year probably won't be. I'm not going to go into detail (it's private), but the second year after a loss...how do I put this? It's the beginning of it being normal that the person is gone. Samhain was always a big deal on campus, just as it is for Wiccans--one of the few holidays where campus as a whole agreed with its Wiccan plurality--and it is a big deal for us, yet. We got together last night, everyone who could make it, and went through the old ceremony complete with party. Kayla's boy and a couple of the other sprouts and their friends held me for ransom and were duly paid off with candy, and it made me feel a bit better.

Samhain (which is pronounced "Sah-when") was always a big deal on campus, as I said. It is the Day of the Dead, from Celtic tradition (the Mexican Day of the Dead is a mixture of Aztec and Celtic tradition via the Catholic Church), which sounds creepy, like zombies, or something, but is actually warm and kind of goofy in mood, at least it always was with us. It doesn't have a lot to do with Halloween anymore, except for sharing the date. But Samhain was also the end of our school year; we had a long winter break instead of a summer break, so that we could shut down most of the buildings in the coldest weather and not have to heat them. Samhain to Brigit, only the Mansion stayed open and those of us who stayed the winter cooked in our dorms or in the small kitchen off the Great Hall. Except for Brigit itself, the Chapel Building stayed closed until Ostara. Time to think and time to plan, and time for the Masters to go off and be ordinary people again, if they wanted to be, instead of witches and wizards.

Celtic sabbats, like Jewish holidays, start at sundown the previous day, or at least so said Kit. I haven't encountered anyone else who says it, but it makes sense given that a lot of our mainstream holidays have an "eve" to them. Any little kid knows Christmas starts on Christmas Eve, and Halloween itself is All Hallows Eve, the night leading into All Saints Day. So as the sun set on Halloween my first year on campus and I got ready to head to the Chapel, I looked out the window of my friend's dorm-room and saw the campus was becoming a sea of stars. The little lamps lining the streets and paths of campus might have been Jack-O-Lanterns, and at first I thought they were, but Sarah would not hold with growing food with the intention of wasting it, and Charlie would not hold with buying hundreds of pumpkins from off campus as mere decoration. So there were very few carved pumpkins around, and instead campus glowed with hundreds of tea-lights floating in wooden bowls borrowed from the Dining Hall. Sheafs of spent corn stalks graced every doorway, and tables of whole pumpkins, squashes, beats, apples, and dried seedheads of dozens of plants had replaced all the flower arrangements and window-boxes that had adorned campus all through the growing season. Walking over the the Chapel I passed dozens of people I knew, but I noticed they were all adults; I knew the sprouts and even some of their friends had come on campus earlier in the day, and I couldn't figure out where they had all gone. "Sprout," in case I haven't explained, is our term for a child associated with the school in some way, usually relatives of Masters.

The ceremony started the same way the one at Brigit did, except there was an extra row of seats in the audience. We sat in cold candlelight as the Masters filed in, chanting, holding their candles, which this time were already lit. They put their candles on the stage and then everyone except Greg and Allen left the stage and joined us in the audience. Greg held a candle, Allen did not. Greg had been the Head of the Master's Group for two years, and now it was Allen's turn, so after a short speech calling the ceremony to order, Greg handed the candle to Allen and formally transferred leadership status. We all clapped. That's all the hierarchy the Masters had, just the Head. They did most things by consensus.

The ceremony itself was kind of short. Allen acted as MC, introducing other people as they came up to do their part. Greg read aloud a list of people being memorialized, mostly friends and relatives of community members (anyone was allowed to add a name to the list in the days leading up to Samhain). I recognized a few names of cultural "ancestors," too, and later I learned to recognize more such names. Edward Abby, Jacques Cousteau, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, it was an eclectic list. Three names, I later learned, belonged to Masters who had died while working for the school. Two, a male couple who had helped found the Masters' Group, had died together in a car crash in the mid-eighties. The third man had been disabled by a stroke and lived on in semi-retirement on campus for several years before finally dying of pneumonia. I don't know how many people in the chapel that day had known those three when they were alive--some had, most had not--but the memorial ceremony insured they would not be forgotten. After the reading of the list, three people got up, one by one, to eulogize people who had died within the past year. And then things got a little silly.

Kit, who had the best voice on campus, lead us in a song. I'd never heard it before, but I've since learned it was adapted by a song written by a folk group called "Schooner Fare." The chorus of the original goes like this;

Hats off to old folks, wherever they may be,
cause they have the best hopes for you and for me.
I stand up for old folks, so you'll hear me say my
hat's off to old folks, and I hope I'll be one someday.

What Kit taught us switched the word "dead" for "old," and "I know" for "I hope."

My hat's off to dead folks and I know I'll be one some day.

One after another, half a dozen or so people stood up and sang a verse, each one celebrating the life of someone who had died. Then we'd sing the chorus and then there'd be another verse. I think us yearlings all felt a little uncomfortable with the song, at first, I mean hats off to dead folks? It's hardly reverential and it's certainly not euphemistic. But with each verse we loosened up a bit until by the end of it I, at least, meant every word. I stand up for dead folks. My hat's off to them. Seriously.

I'd only ever really lost one person at that point, my great aunt, who had died several years earlier. She was very old so it hadn't been a surprise, and I'd liked her, but I hadn't known her very well. She didn't live near us when I was growing up. But listening to that song got me thinking about who she was, what she'd wanted, and what she'd done. I made up my mind to ask my Mom about Aunt Ida next chance I got. We'd lost cats and dogs, too, when I was little, but I'd stopped counting those when Aunt Ida died, because it seemed childish to think of those as losses, too. But I remember I'd cried when my little black and white kitten died, when I was seven. Charlie, I knew, kept a photograph of a dog, framed in silver, on his desk in his room. He obviously did not have a dog now. If Charlie could count a dog as important enough for a framed photograph when, so far as I knew, he kept no images of humans, maybe I should start remembering my kitten again. Some of the people around me in the audience were crying openly while others were laughing, and a lot of people were doing both at once. Finally, the ceremony ended; all the candles (except for the ones on the walls) were snuffed out but one, the one Allen had, and he solemnly returned it to somewhere in the next room. The others stayed with us. All around the walls of the Chapel room were posters celebrating the lives of the people the community was memorializing, and some of us spent some time looking at them before heading out to the fire pit. Allen had told us there would be food there. That there would also be a bonfire and songs and stories and merriment went without saying. The posters would be up for the following day, until we closed the building. On my way out I heard something that sounded like a struggle of some sort, but everyone around me ignored it, so I did, too.

When we collected at the fire pit there was indeed plenty of food set out on tables, plus hot chocolate and cider, both hard and sweet, and a couple of people already had out their guitars and drums. And then someone said that Allen was missing.

And he was. It was odd, because everyone else was there, even Greg, who rarely went to parties, and Sarah, who was usually uncomfortable with things pagan, though she liked parties in a general way. Everyone was there, but Allen was conspicuously missing.

A small figure, either a woman or a boy, it was hard to tell which, strode suddenly into the clearing. It wore a homemade costume, vaguely pirate-ish, and carried a plastic sword and a very real lit torch. In the torchlight I could see it had a black patch over one eye and a bandana tied around the head, covering the lower half of the face. I did not know what was going on, but the older students and the faculty acted as though the figure were armed and dangerous. When it spoke, the voice was high and strange, deliberately disguised.

"We have stolen Allen! We have him! He is our prisoner, and you will never see him again if you do not do what we say! We are in charge, now!"

The figure was a child, and in a moment I had figured out who he must be; it was Allen's own son, one of the missing sprouts. Of course it was a prank of some kind, but the use of Allen's first name struck me as more of a violation of the ordinary than the charade of threat. Of course, Allen's kids called him Dad or Daddy, but all the other sprouts always called him Dr. Allen. The school community was not quite egalitarian, and while none of us called the Masters "professor," or anything like that, the children were not allowed to be so assertive. All adults were Ms. Mr. or Dr. to them. Except on Samhain.

The masters and some of the students begged and pleaded. They melodramatically groveled, but they could not make the boy relent. The ransom would have to be paid, and it must be paid in candy. The begging and the pleading was an act, and the child knew it, but the bargaining was obviously very real and in the end the sprouts got far more than I had expected them to get; nearly five pounds of candy each ("only the good kinds!"), plus a couple of glow-in-the-dark toy swords, three jars of jam, and a promise that this year they would all be allowed to have sleepovers on school nights, as long as the guest went to the same school and everyone stayed caught up on homework. Then they returned Allen, bringing him into the circle flanked by costumed guards of ridiculously small size but fearsome mien. He'd been treated fairly roughly, it seemed, bound and gagged and face-painted like a clown. The booty was exchanged for the prisoner and the miscreants cheered and ran, taking their treasure with them. Allen could not untie himself, so we helped him, but predictably as soon as his gag was off he started laughing.

"You taught them to tie knots this year, didn't you?" he accused Charlie, "I really couldn't get out." Charlie protested his innocence, but he had in fact taught a knot-tying course at the summer camp.

"At least they've learned to paint faces properly," Charlie pointed out. "Last year they used my sister's make-up."

"What is going on?" I asked the student standing next to me.

"Trick or treat," he explained. "They do this every year, kidnap one of the Masters, or sometimes a senior student. Last year it was Charlie. Twenty years ago it was the Masters' own idea. The Six set the rules, said how far they could go, instigated the whole thing. Since then it's been passed from kid to kid and none of them know the game was invented by grown-ups anymore. They bring their friends. When you see them again, remember to pretend you don't know who did it."

"Do they know we can recognize them?" I asked.

"The older ones do--it's sort of like Santa Claus, I guess. But them being in charge for one night isn't a charade--you saw Allen, he really couldn't get loose on his own. And twenty kids against one man, he probably couldn't have resisted capture without seriously hurting them. He really was at their mercy."

Trick or treat!
 

Landscaping

So, what seems to be evolving is that while I make plans for the second iteration of this story, this first one is sort of sputtering. Again it has been a month between posts. I can tell you that the next version will almost certainly be hosted by Wordpress, will update twice a week, and will include pictures. I have no photographs of my time at the school, and though I could probably find some photos, I'd rather illustrate with my own drawings and paintings. I did several watercolors at the time, and I can do other illustrations from memory. A picture is worth a thousand words, as anyone who has ever tried to describe a picture knows.

Anyway, in the meantime, I will tell you a little more of the school and try to post more often. I'll also be busy preparing for next year, since with the baby coming I might really appreciate having some of the work done ahead. I've got my fingers crossed for a baby who likes the sound of typing, though. I'll get so much done, up typing with a crying baby at three AM.

I think I've told you that Charlie was a landscaper--he had a landscaping company before he started working for the school, and he was also the head groundskeeper on campus. When I think of the word "landscaping" I normally think of a sort of ornamental horticulture; shrub boarders along foundations, flower beds, that sort of thing. And of course, Charlie did that and he taught me to do it. I work summers with a landscaper now, to supplement my writing and teaching income, and we do foundation shrubs and flower beds. But Charlie as a landscaper also had an opportunity that people working on small suburban lots really don't have; campus was about two hundred acres, including the farm fields and the woodlot, and on those acres Charlie could quite literally create a landscape. I have not described campus much, and that suddenly seems like a serious oversight, given that land's relationship to my teacher and, by extension, to me.

He did not start from nothing, of course; a landscape existed before he got there. It was, as I understand it, the overgrown remnants of a well-manicured boy's boarding school, St. Something Or Other. The campus had been abandoned five or ten years, and part of what Charlie did was simply selective acceptance of overgrowth. The lawns mostly became miniature grasslands, maintained by the grazing of sheep and goats, but the young seeding maples that had begun invading the edges he protected, doubling the width of the stately sugar maple line that marched its way along the main entrance road. In some cases he deliberately planted, like the dogwoods he added down by the pond. In some cases he cut and in some cases he cut, added, and allowed, all at once.

Lines of trees must have been a big thing for whoever landscaped St. Something Or Other. There were the sugar maple lines flanking the main entrance, white oaks flanking the secondary entrance, red maples in a line near the dining hall, and Norway spruces forming a kind of three sided box maybe three hundred feet on a side, between the Mansion and the second entrance way on the far side. The fourth wall of that box was formed by a smaller, narrow box, the formal gardens, a rectangle defined by venerable arbor vitae. Charlie kept the formal gardens, gradually trading out the grass for mosses and the exotics for natives, except for one Chinese dogwood that Charlie had planted himself, in honor of his mother when she died. He got rid of the Norway spruce lines.

Norway spruces are strange and graceful trees. You've probably seen them, dark green spires with rows of thin twigs hanging straight down from the swooping branches like dark green dredlocks. That first winter I saw the remaining Norway spruces lifting in the dark, snowy wind, a lonely, wolfish sight, and I bet those lines must have been something when they were intact. But Charlie did not like exotics, nor did he like lines. As he put it, a single line of trees does not do much except get in the way. So he felled a third of the spruces, blowing out irregular holes in the line, and then planted a second line, this time of white pine, behind the surviving spruces. He used live Christmas trees, eight or ten years old, and filled in around them with eastern hemlock, both black and yellow birch, and more arbor vitae. The pines had a head start and the ones near the gaps grew fast. By the time I came to campus, the lines were gone; in their place were irregular wooded strips, maybe thirty to fifty feet wide, the dark conifer greens lit up by the yellow of the birches in the fall. The pines had grown old enough so they looked like trees to my eyes, ten inches in diameter, some of them.

That first summer I was there, Charlie and a few of his buddies took down half of the remaining spruces, the latest iteration of a plan begun twenty years before. The man sculpted in trees and thought in decades.

I remember that was the first year I took Charlie's chainsaw safety course. He taught it on campus with a buddy of his from the Forest Service, and a lot of senior students interested in forestry or trail maintenance took the course for certification. I'd learned to use a chainsaw from my Dad, but I had a hunch I'd learned it wrong and I wanted to learn it right. Anyway, Charlie was teaching it, and since I never knew when he was going to say something remarkable, I tried to take as many of his workshops and classes as I could. Part of the practice work we did in that class was to cut up the spruce branches for fire wood for the outdoor fire pit, so that class and those spruces are united in my mind. The trunk sections Charlie sold to a buddy of his who makes custom furniture.

I remember the class mostly consisted of watching videos, some required by the Forest Service, others that Charlie simply liked. One was a kind of good logger/bad logger comparison featuring one guy who did everything right and another who did everything wrong, and ends up felling a tree on himself. The bad logger was called Charlie, so the last words of the video were "remember, don't be a Charlie." The coincidence of the name struck us all as funny, especially since Charlie, our Charlie, was so unimpeacheably competent at so much. If he ever made mistakes he did it in private, and he did not encourage questioning of his skill. So we had a lot of laughs, not quite at his expense, over that video and its unbelievably incompetent antihero.

When the video was done, Charlie walked to the front of the room to eject the tape. He was dressed kind of oddly. There were outsiders in the class as well, so we weren't wearing school uniforms, and Charlie always did look strange dressed in normal clothing. But we'd all dressed like sawyers in long sleeves and work pants, on his insistence, whereas he was wearing loose shorts and a tank top. He took out the tape and did a strange thing. Turning to us, he pulled up one of the legs of his shorts as high as he could and there, on his thigh up near his groin, on skin so pale I doubt it had sunlight in decades, was a series of long, ropey scars. The muscle on either side of the scars puckered oddly in a way I have since seen only on some war veterans. It means the muscle had once been severed. I'd already taken the wilderness first aid course that summer, and I knew where the femoral artery passes and how quickly life can flow out of that artery when it is cut. Charlie had, some time in his past, almost cut his own leg off. He'd come within an inch or so of dying. He offered no explanation. With Charlie, you could expect a clear and thorough explanation of anything in the world except Charlie and we had learned not to ask.

"You're never too smart to be dumb," he told us. "Don't be a Charlie."

Mabon

Has it really been nearly a month since I posted? While anyone who read the last post will understand why I’ve been distracted this time, this project deserves better. There are other things about this blog I am not happy with, and so I have come to a decision; I am going to start over this winter. I am going to write this the way I intended to originally, as though it were happening to me now. That way you will find out about the school as I did, a little at a time, through people and events and doings. I will probably use a different website for the new version of the project—I will let you know when I get the details sorted out. In the meantime, I will keep you posted.

The fall equinox has just passed. The associated holiday is called Mabon, and I still celebrate it, as I celebrate all of these holidays, in my own way. “In my own way,” this year turned out to be a party. I don’t live very far from the old campus, and there’s a bunch of us in the area who get together every so often. This weekend, we had a party, two dozen or so former students and staff. We all brought food, plus there was a good bit of alcohol, and someone brought a guitar. We sang and danced for a while, and then most of us ended up outside around a fire, wrapped up in blankets and telling stories about the past. I’m not sure what, other than the weather and the hard cider, really counted as seasonal or holiday-related, but we’re all used to doing something special on the equinox. I’m not sure how to explain it. Holidays and other cultural traditions seem arbitrary from the outside, and so they are, but they don’t feel arbitrary from the inside. They feel like a fact of nature, a kind of emotional gravity well. Imagine moving to a new country where they don’t celebrate Christmas. Even if you are not Christian, even if you don’t celebrate the holiday yourself, it might seem kind of odd to treat December 25^th like just another ordinary day. For me, the world outside of campus has become a new country.  I was born here, in the ordinary world, but I feel like an immigrant in my own land. I’ve either gained a home or lost one, I can’t tell which. I party on certain days because I do not want old habits to die. Not yet.

On campus we celebrated the Equinox in a variety of ways; it wasn’t a major campus holiday (it did not mark a semester break), and there were a couple of events but not everyone participated in them.  One thing pretty much all of us did was what we called a “thank you gathering.” We made a big circle—close to seventy people—and took turns handing each other a ball of yarn and thanking each other.  You unrolled the yarn as you went, so once you had thanked someone—and you could thank them for anything, large or small—you remained linked by a length of yarn. Then the person who got thanked had the yarn and could use it to thank someone else. Eventually there was a web of yarn tangling everybody together. A kid (it was Allen’s son) was in charge of adding new balls of yarn as the old one ran out and he also ferried the ball of yarn from one person to another so we didn’t get tangled in the web. He could run around under the yarn, if we lifted up the web for him. It sounds hokey, but it ended up being really fun. We used a lot of yarn, but I found out later it was from the weaver who made most of our clothing and all of our wool blankets and rugs. It was the yarn that had come out wrong, spun all lumpy and irregular, mostly by trainees, over the course of a year.

It sounds a bit hokey, but actually it was a lot of fun. We were outside, and the weather was gorgeous, crisp and blue, with the trees just beginning to turn but most of them still green, and people goofing around with the yarn or dancing a bit to no music anyone else could hear, or laughing at the stories being told about why this or that person was grateful to someone else…sometimes someone told a serious story, or handed the yarn over with only a hug, too moved for words, and we all grew still.

Something about making a point of expressing gratitude makes a person think op more things to be grateful for. I’d never noticed, particularly, how much I appreciated what the people of campus, masters and students, did.  It was like the feelings moved along inside me when I wasn’t noticing, but for once I noticed them, really noticed all these awesome people I’d landed among. I’d also never known how much other people appreciated me. I don’t think much about myself—you notice I’ve been writing this for months now and you hardly know anything about me—and I sometimes forget that of course other people do think about me, for better or worse. It’s not that I thought people didn’t like me, but I was really touched to find out I actually mattered to some people. It was a warm, fuzzy feeling we wove, along with the yarn that day.

Afterwards, we did not untangle the yarn but we wrapped up the web into a big ball. I asked what it would be used for—I’d noticed that hardly anything on campus was ever just thrown out—and one of the senior students told me it would be used to kindle the fire on Brigid. I remembered the candle light on Brigid, and the ceremony of the candles, when I lit Kit’s candle from my own back when I didn’t know her at all, and it struck me that the light we gave the faculty members so they could light the room for us was actually this gratitude of the community, shining. And it struck me, too, that the candlelight of Brigid was only eight months in the past. I’d only been eight months at the school. It felt like I’d been there forever.

Moon Man

Neil Armstrong died this past week, and now there is a full moon. I keep thinking about it. The moon is a big deal for a lot of people I met through school--it's a big deal to me, though I find it easier to talk about what it means to other people, people who are more overtly religious than I am. When you don't have a religion to talk about, all you have is spirituality, the deeply personal, the hard to explain.

I'm going to be thirty-one years old this coming month. I obviously don't remember a moon without Neil Armstrong's footprint on it. Not that I can see the print, but I know about it. I've always known about it. My first memory of the moon, in fact, is of my Dad telling me about how astronauts had walked on it. I had a picture book all about it. I wonder what it was like to look up and see a moon that nobody had ever walked on, and then see that change.

I know people who wish it had never happened. For them, the moon is the Goddess, period, and the thought of the moon also being a planetary body of rock and dust seems disturbing. Even Kit, who does not object to the moon landing, tends to ignore it. She looks up and sees the Lady. She does not see men's footprints there.

I know other people who wish humans would go back to the moon, who see our failure to go back as a failure of human spirit. I don't know what to think.

Tonight, I went out to my garden, our garden, at the house my wife and I rent. We're allowed to do all our own landscaping, and we've done a little backyard habitat, like Charlie taught me. But we also have a moon garden. It's mostly natives, but it's all pale plants and white flowers, or flowers that open at night, for moths. There's a bird-bath in the middle, and I go out there sometimes, to think. I take out my athame, the one Kit gave me, and I look at the moon reflected in the water, and I pray. Or I get as close as I get to prayer, anyway. Tonight I prayed for Neil Armstrong.

And I prayed for my wife and our baby, the one she thinks we're going to have. We don't know for sure yet. We weren't planning for this, we weren't trying, but we weren't trying not to, either. Imagine; our own little astronaut, swimming weightless in my wife's sea.

We're all exploring a new world, every day.

The moon was significant for Charlie, too, though he never explained what he saw when he looked at it. He never explained much about himself, and I never asked. There's a lot about his story I never knew, and probably never will, now. But he did sometimes tell me snippets, little hints, about who he was, and he once told me about his first AA meeting, and how he got sober. He never told me about his drinking, and he told me very little about his sobriety, but he told me how one became the other.

It was back when the Master's Group was still just six friends,three of whom owned a house together, and the students, or those people who eventually evolved into students, would crash out in the basement, studying, doing yoga or sometimes drugs, wondering what, exactly, enlightenment was. There were six then as there are six now, but nobody from back then is left. I've only ever met one of them. Charlie was friends with them, and worked as a landscaper and arborist.

I don't know how or why, but Charlie got in trouble. He lost his apartment--that's how he said it, "lost," like he misplaced it somehow. He asked his friends if he could stay with them for a while, and they said yes--if he went to one AA meeting first. I'll try to put the story in Charlie's own words.

"If they'd said I had to get sober I would have ignored them. I'd have slept on a park bench. I didn't need their sanctimonious shit, telling me what to do...not when they had half a dozen kids getting stoned every night in their basement. But they just said I had to go to one meeting. Just one meeting. I figured, what the hell, I've done worse things for rent. I slept through half the meeting, but when it was over, I got up, walked outside to where all the reformed drunks were standing around, smoking and gabbing...and as I came out from under the eves of the building, the light of the fill moon fell on my face. And I knew I'd never drink again. I asked Jim--he took me to the meeting--to help me get into rehab. He did. And I went."

I asked Charlie then why he went to rehab, why he bothered attending AA meetings at all, if he knew from that moment that he'd never drink again. And he looked at me the way you'd look at some little kid who had just said something irrelevant.

"Daniel," he said to me, "when God speaks, you don't ask those kinds of questions."

Philosopher's Stone Soup

So, I said I'd tell you about Philosopher's Stone Soup. It went pretty much all year round, except for the winter break, but I only got my act in gear to join it over the summer, so my first and lasting impression of it was of summertime, when we cooked and ate outside, our talk punctuated by the tickle of grass and the long summer shadows, our food seasoned with the scent of citronella candles and environmentally-friendly bug spray.

Philosopher's Stone Soup was a weekly potluck run by Allen and Kit, or, at least Kit was usually there. I'm not sure she was doing much running (she had her own extra-curricular activity, a free-form jam session for the school's many musicians). Except, for most potlucks you're supposed to bring prepared dishes, but for Stone Soup you had to bring ingredients. You could bring anything you wanted, as long as you could get it edible within twenty minutes (no whole frozen turkeys, for example). People would bring flour, zucchini, blueberries, lillies (they're edible), cookies, squirrel meat, and pretty much anything else you could think of.We'd figure out some way to make a single meal out of it. Usually the idea was Allen's; he was a phenomenal cook. Then we'd make the meal, and then over dinner Allen would ask what we wanted to talk about.

It was always a trick question, because whatever subject we brought up he would pick it apart. He was the philosopher of Philosopher's Stone Soup. He'd start out asking clarifying questions and gently pointing out inconsistencies and logical errors, and he'd keep right on going until he had thoroughly demonstrated than we did not know what we were talking about. We put up with this for two reasons. First, we knew what he was doing. You hear about the Socratic Method as though the point of all the questions is to finally arrive at some kind of knowledge, but that isn't what Socrates did, and that isn't what Allen did. Instead, you ended up at the very limits of knowledge. Allen used his sharp mind first to cut through all our assumptions and mental sloppinesses, and then he kept on cutting, kept on pressing us, chasing us out along the edges of what we knew and were sure of, until....

I've read that there was once a culture where they would hold contests on how to define God. First one team would offer a definition, then the other team would offer a better definition, and they would keep going until eventually one of the teams wouldn't be able to respond, wouldn't be able to define God any better. And in that silence of not knowing was God.

Not that we didn't get frustrated with Allen sometimes, but it was impossible to be angry with him, because he was such a cut-up. And that was the other reason we kept coming back. Once, I did get at least half angry and actually called him an eel. I would never, never in a million years, have called one of my teachers names at any other school, but then this school wasn't like any other. Allen just laughed. I think he actually laughed so hard he sprayed out a mouthful of wine, but I might be making that part up. It's hard to remember. But he did laugh.

"One of Socrates' friends said something similar," he said when he could speak. "Called him a torpedo-fish, which is the same thing as an electric eel. Really, I'm honored." He snorted again with laughter. We were all laughing, too. It was infectious, his laugh.

"What did Socrates do, when his friend called him a torpedo-fish?" I asked, trying to get a hold of myself.

"Told him to stop flirting with him," Allen replied.

"I'm not flir--" I burst out, indignant, and everybody erupted in laughter again. Except that Allen fixed me with his incisive gaze and, very calmly, asked me how I knew I was not flirting with him. Then he busted up laughing again. Allen is the only man I have ever known who could do a dead-on perfect imitation of himself.

Lughnasadh

I could have titled this post "Lammas," the name refers to the same holiday, and it is easier to pronounce and to spell, but we almost always used Lughnasadh on campus. It's August 1st.

Lughnasadh was not a big deal for most of us, although we did have that day off from classes--the summer semester ended the day before, and there was a break of a few days before the fall semester began. There was also a big lunch that Sarah used to more or less show off the farm. I can't remember if I've said so before or not, but we ate very well on campus. We ate strangely, because there were almost no foods that weren't local (coffee and chocolate were both exceptions), and either in season or dried or canned. We had no refrigeration on campus, either, and some things, like eggs and milk, were rationed. That all doesn't sound very good, it sounds like deprivation, but we actually always got enough--there just was no room to waste. And everything we did eat tasted fantastic, and a lot of that was Sarah's doing. Every vegetable of hers I ate was always the best one of that kind of vegetable I'd ever had. On that first Lughnasadh, I remember I was eating stuffed squash, and I don't even usually like squash. There was a big party tent set up outside, in case of rain, I suppose, because we ate out on the meadow near the Dinning Hall, just eating and talking. It went on for hours. Some people brought guitars or juggled, or just sat around and read. One girl, Amanda, took a nap under a table.

The masters left the party early, and they did not all leave at the same time. The only reason I noticed was that I watch people (I’m a writer), and I happened to be watching Greg when he left. I’d been watching him much of the afternoon, because I was surprised he was there; Greg did not usually attend community events if he didn’t have to, though today he seemed to be in an unusually good mood, joking and laughing with some of his friends. Then he left. I was watching the door to the tent, thinking, when Alan left. Odd. Were they going somewhere together? I knew they got along, but Greg seemed so separate from the others, it seemed strange to think of him making plans with somebody. I decided to look around and see who else had left, and I noticed Joy was gone, as were both Joes and Chuck, the maintenance man. Obviously the masters were going to do something as a group that we students weren’t supposed to know about. I debated asking one of them directly—a direct question usually got an answer, and the masters sometimes did things mysteriously in order to provoke students into asking. But they also sometimes acted mysteriously for the pleasure of being mysterious, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to spoil their fun—or mine.

But I got distracted from any snooping or questioning I might have done that day, because Kit and Sarah started singing. They weren't performing. Maybe they were practicing. They were sitting off by end of the big tent where we'd had our holiday lunch. Sarah was sitting on a tall stool, Kit was standing. She wore, I remember, not the school uniform, but a green dress with mirrors flecks sewn in that set off her hair, just so. Sarah wore a simple, grey skirt she had sewn herself, and she had her hair done up in a yellow bandana. And they sang "I Come to the Garden Alone," Sarah in a sweet soprano, Kit weaving her earthy alto in and among Sarah's tune.

I went over to listen to them--Kit looked at me briefly, nervously, but otherwise they both ignored me, which was fine with me. I would not have thought they were friends, except for those occasional duets. They were both so zealously committed to religions that each excluded the other, not that it had to be that way--Sarah was not the only Christian on campus--but that was how they had both made it. And yet they sang duets. I'd heard they were once close, as students.

Finally, they stopped, embraced, and Kit began to gather her things to leave. Sarah sat down next to me, but she was looking off behind me, watching something. I turned, and saw she was watching Charlie. Here eyes followed him as he gathered his things, spoke briefly to a few people, and left the tent.

"You were his student, weren't you?" I asked. This was common knowledge, but I was being conversational. Also I was being nosy. I wanted to know about the strange, almost but not quite neutral expression on her face as she watched him. She blushed, slightly, but whether it was because she'd been rude enough to completely ignore me (Sarah was usually very conscientious and polite), or because I'd clearly noticed her watching Charlie, I couldn't tell.

"I still am," she told me, quietly.

"Did he always make it so hard to be his student?" He had just made me re-label several dozen trees again, so I was a bit irritated, but Sarah clearly thought I meant his resistance to taking on students to begin with, which was legendary.

"Oh, no. He used to be pretty outgoing, to a fault, if anything. He seemed to think he was God's gift to students. He couldn't wait to teach us."

"Really?" I'd never heard of this. "What happened?"

"If he has not told you, I will not."

"Well, what else was he like? What was he like when you were a candidate?"

"He knew everything, same as he does now," Sarah smiled nostalgically as she spoke. "You know how your parents seem to know everything when you're small? He really did. He made the world seem bigger."

"I guess you're like Alan, then, stuck between him and Kit?" I shouldn't have asked about this, and Sarah shot me a look, but I thought it was common knowledge that Kit and Charlie were more or less allergic to each other. To my surprise, Sarah shook her head.

"It wasn't like that. We were his students together. I found my way to Jesus through him, and she found her Goddess. She admired him as much as I did,"

"What happened?"

"We both grew up, I think," she answered. I must have asked too many questions, though, because Sarah nodded to me in farewell, and abruptly got up and left. It was a self-protective gesture so like Charlie that if I didn't know better I could have sworn she was his daughter.

Commitment

I twisted my ankle yesterday morning, so I'm laid-up today. I can barely walk. If I don't feel better by tomorrow, I'll head to the doctor. In the meantime, I can't do any of my chores or errands (darn!). I'm pretty much forced to sit here with my feet up and write this thing. As you can see, it's been a while since I wrote--life got in the way again--so it's probably a good thing thing to be forced to get back to it.

Thinking about being forced to do things, I'm reminded of what Charlie said about everybody needing a boogyman. I almost said "what Charlie always said," when in fact he only said it once in my hearing, but the principle was so much a part of our work together. He "made" me work so hard, harder than I would have ever worked on my own initiative--and of course, I could have quit any time I liked. That he made me do things was a fiction the two of us maintained, and a useful one. It's weird, I'd always thought that once I grew up and didn't have to listen to my parents anymore, I'd be free to do whatever I wanted, but somehow I needed Charlie to tell me to do things I wanted to do, or else I couldn't have done them. It's still like that; I write paid articles because my editor makes me, or because my wife needs me to make my share of the rent. Then I quit writing at the end of the day because my wife makes me socialize. Now you, my readers, are making me write this, or the others who wear the green ring are making me do this, maybe even Charlie is making me write this. I sound like such a total wimp.

And yet, if no one cared what I did...an oak tree grows tall because of the shade and constraint of surrounding trees. Its stature is a reaction to gravity and to its hunger for the sun. The tree's strength is in reaction to the challenge of wind, and its biochemical personality is a fight against caterpillars and galls. Things take on shape and identity because context pushes them to do it, a pushing that is at once constraining and receiving. I never thought about this when I was a novice, as we called the undergraduates (the few graduate students were "candidates"). I was nineteen, and as much as I thought of myself as an independent adult, I was still used to obeying teachers and parents. There is a lot I didn't think to question that I need to think about now.

Speaking of being made to do things, I think it was around this time of year that I finally got all the trees on campus labeled. I went to tell Charlie, but he complained that about thirty trees were not labeled. I could have sworn I'd done them, but I went ahead and did them again. Then another group of trees turned up unlabeled. The third time it happened, I grew suspicious, and accused Charlie of removing the labels. I expected him  to either get offended by the accusation or laugh at me for catching him, but instead he treated me like a schoolboy making excuses.

"I don't care why the trees got unlabeled," he growled, "you've got to get them labeled and keep them that way! When I inspect them in the evening, I want to see every tree labeled!" I was about to object that I couldn't possibly make sure they were all labeled if he was unlabeling them during the inspection, when I remembered that Charlie usually looked over the campus in the early morning. That he'd said he'd inspect in the evening was odd. Charlie rarely talked, and when he did talk he was usually very deliberate about what he said. I realized that he was unlabeling the trees in the morning and inspecting in the evening, meaning that I now had to check every tree on campus for its label every day. I would be done when and if Charlie decided to stop unlabeling more trees than I could label in one day. Before walking away, Charlie told me that when I relabeled a tree, I should not just replace the label but go over in my mind the identifying features of the tree. He suggested I greet each tree by name.

Yes, I was angry with him. I think I complained loudly behind his back. I never complained to Charlie; he was doing what I'd asked him to do. By the time he let me finally stop in mid-September, I knew every single tree on campus individually. There were hundreds of them. I knew them better than I knew my fellow students.