Christmas

I have described Yule on campus, and it is true that Yule, not Christmas, was the major winter holiday for the school as a whole. Many of us did celebrate Christmas, but most of us did so off campus with our families. Most of the people on campus over Christmas itself were there precisely because they did not celebrate the holiday. Yet, there were some exceptions, and that first year I was one of them. I celebrated Christmas at school.

I was curious, mostly, plus my brother, recently married, had decided to take his wife on a cruise, so it wasn't as though Christmas at home would be exactly as I remembered it, either. And I suppose that, at twenty, I was eager to prove I was really out on my own now. In later years I went home for the holiday, but at least I got my curiosity satisfied.

My parents had sent me a Christmas care package, though we planned to exchange gifts in person later. There were five or six of us who planned to celebrate together and they had care packages, too. Our plan was to have breakfast together and open our packages and exchange Christmas cards with each other. We'd also decided to give presents among ourselves, but limited to gifts that we'd made, already had, or that cost less than five dollars. We knew of nothing official scheduled, and I think we expected that by the end of the day we'd feel pretty lonely and sad. It didn't end up that way.

 On Christmas Eve I went to the midnight service in town. I was a little late--almost late for the service--because biking in the dark down the narrow road proved a little sketchy and I walked part of the way. I'd picked the UU church, and was not surprised to see Allen and his family there. He seemed a bit surprised to see me, but then I was not a regular attendee and I knew he was. He invited me to sit with them and was friendly with me, but it was the slightly distracted friendliness teachers often have when they see students out of context. I took my place on the pew next to Alexis, the littlest of Allen's kids. I don't know if she recognized me, but she obviously knew I was friends with her father and therefor an ok adult.

"I'm staying up till MIDNIGHT!" she told me, with no preamble.

"You're staying up later than that," her father corrected her, gently, "it's almost midnight now. The service goes until at least one. See my watch?" He was still explaining the mysteries of clock time when the service started. Over his bent head I made eye contact with Lo, Allen's wife, and she smiled her fondness of him.

The service was a bit different than the Methodist Christmas service I grew up with, but familiar enough, and the sermon was interesting. I forget now what it was about, but I remember that I thought about it for a few days. I felt a bit strange attending a ceremony in street clothes, like I should have been wearing my school uniform. And I felt a second strangeness after noticing the first. Increasingly I was feeling as though things on campus were normal and everything else was unreal. I glanced over at Allen; he wore a jacket and tie and seemed comfortable in them, but then he never looked right in school uniforms anyway. We were standing to sing while I thought these things and Alexis stood on the pew and sang along. She knew all the words, I noticed, except some words she clearly did not understand and mangled cutely. Oh, come all lee faithful, joyful and tri-umpant. Here father held her hand.

It must have been almost three in the morning before I got to bed, but I was up again at eight, ready to open presents...and to my surprise, there were some. I went down stares to the Great Hall and found that someone--I never found out who--had hung candy-canes and red and green Hershey's kisses on the tree; the kisses were speared through with loops of wire so they could hang. Someone had set out trays of doughnuts and bowls of oranges. The oranges were as rare a treat as the doughnuts, since usually all our fruit was local. There was coffee and hot cocoa waiting. And there were presents. Besides the ones we got for each other, I mean. Each of us who celebrated Christmas had a little bag with our name on it and inside was some small but perfect thing, all of them either inexpensive or probably used. I got a nice pair of binoculars. They were a little beat-up looking, but worked perfectly. Andy got a booklet on local scenic bicycling routes. Ollie got a deck of playing cards and an odd little set of magnetized marbles. And so on. It was more than just getting stuff; it was knowing that someone obviously really knew each of us, knew and cared, that warmed the heart. But who? None of us had done it, and a few of us got presents that were perfect in ways none of the other students could have known. Had Santa been here? Had one or another of the Masters--or, perhaps all of them--organized this? It is true that they often seemed to know more about us than we had ever told them.

Either way, it was fun--and accurate--to consider the presents the result of magic.

Yule

Happy Yule!

Yule is not the same as Christmas. Instead, it is a European pagan holiday on or around the winter solstice that merged with Christmas when Northern Europe was Christianized. Modern Wiccans and some others celebrate it on the winter solstice as a distinct holiday. It is basically all those parts of Christmas that don't really have anything to do with Jesus. I had known pagans celebrated Solstice before I got to the school, because I'd had some Wiccan friends in high school, but we never talked about religion much, and they always called it Solstice, at least when they talked with me. So I didn't know Yule meant something specific besides Christmas until I got to campus and I celebrated it for the first time. I've always celebrated it afterwards, and I still celebrate Christmas, too. With the baby coming, my wife and I are going to have to figure out how to have family traditions that make some kind of cohesive sense.

Anyway, there were only maybe twenty of us on campus the day before Yule, since a lot of the people who had stayed on campus after Samhain had gone home for the holidays. I was a little surprised, because we'd been encouraged to be there for Yule, but I was also kind of glad. We had a little Yule dinner around the beautiful old table in the Great Hall dining room and we all fit around it. Kit and Greg both joined us for dinner and helped cook, and they sat at the head and foot of the table like parents--which was strange, as I was not used to thinking of Kit in maternal terms and I had never really connected with Greg. But I liked it. Yule night, I should say, is the night before the sunrise of Yule, not the night after.

After dinner, more people started to arrive. Kit's husband came in, along with a lot of students and a couple graduates. I think we'd swelled to at least forty people before ten o'clock and a full party got going. There were trays of candies and cakes, a lot of alcohol, and dancing. Kit and her musician-friends formed a kind of band whose composition kept changing as one or more members got up to dance and someone else sat down. I was a bit surprised that none of the other Masters appeared, but this party seemed to be mostly a student-thing. It got pretty raucous and it just didn't stop. Around three in the morning I realized we were going to dance the sun up, but I turned out to be wrong.

By five I noticed that Kit was no longer part of the party. I didn't know when she had left. Things were starting to calm down, and I thought maybe she'd gone to bed. I was getting tired myself, and I had to remember that Kit was past forty. One of the older students called us all together and suggested we all climb the mountain to watch the sun come up. Greg would stay behind and watch over the oak logs and bayberry candles that still burned. The only thing was, we had to be utterly silent, not say anything until the sun actually came up. I knew a ritual activity when I heard one, I think we all did, so nearly all of us put on a couple of extra layers, pulled on our boots, grabbed foam pads to sit on, and walked out into the crusty, early-season snow.

We had flashlights, and it is hard to get lost in such a bit group, so hiking in the dark wasn't bad. It was strange not talking, though, moving with such a large crowd in the dark and hearing their breathing, their footfalls in the leaves and the snow, and nobody talking. We climbed to the top of the ridge behind the school to a lookout area where the trees had been cleared to give us a view almost straight down the valley to the east. By that time there was a definite glimmer of dawn; the eastern half of the sky was a luminous blue, with the ghosts of grey clouds just visible here and there. We all settled down to wait.

And heard music.

Someone, somewhere behind us, was playing "Here Comes the Sun" on a tin whistle.

Charlie! I looked around, but could not see him in the gloom under the trees. He finished the song and immediately began it again and this time, after the first few bars, was joined by a guitar. That had to be Allen. I hadn't seen him in weeks. I still couldn't see him, though the air was growing brighter all the time. The song cycled through, over and over, gaining instruments as it went: a violin, a tambourine, and a drum. The masters had all come. It was light enough now that I could probably have seen them if I'd looked, but the dawn was so close I was watching the horizon for the sun. One spot as growing brighter and brighter so that I kept thinking is that the sun? Is that it? Like when you're on an airplane taking off and you wonder if you've left the ground yet until suddenly it's obvious that you have. The sun came up and split the weird pale light of dawn and at that moment the song that had been repeating itself over and over again reached its beginning and it was obvious that we should all sing. Most of us knew the words--I did, I knew all of them.

Sun, sun sun, here it comes! we sang as the sun indeed came. I'd never paid any attention to sunrise before, but now it felt like a victory over darkness, like some sort of achievement. We did it! And when we were done singing we all jumped up and hooted and hollered and hugged like our team had won the Superbowl or something.

And we were completely freezing, having sat in the cold for the better part of an hour. Fortunately, the Masters had not just brought their instruments, they had also brought vast quantities of hot chocolate, cider, and coffee. Kit passed out ginger candies, golden as the sun, and caramels made with cayenne pepper. By the time we all got back down to the Great Hall, breakfast had appeared and so had dozens of other people, including the "sprouts," the children and nieces and nephews of the masters, all playing with new toys and eating cookies and candy. The almost monastic quiet of campus in winter was gone. I'd been up for over twenty-four hours at that point and was pretty fried, but I was also twenty, so I just kept going.  Not everyone did. Greg had gone to bed just after breakfast. I think the noise bothered him some, he wasn't a very outgoing person, and he was by no means young. Most of the masters fell asleep on the couches for at least a few minutes, and some took naps. Around noon, we found Kit curled up asleep under the Yule tree and her husband picked her up and carried her off to bed like a child. It was very sweet. I don't think she was exactly sober at that point, and she didn't wake up except to wrap her arms around her husband's neck, smiling. I wished I could have offered to help carry her, but of course I could not. It was years before I even admitted to her I'd seen her looking so cute and vulnerable. She would have been mortified.

Happy Yule, everyone.

The Busiest Winter Vacation Ever

I have previously written of my winter on campus as a very low-key and relaxing thing, and I do remember it that way; when I remember winter at school, the first image that comes to mind is myself seated by the wood stove in the Great Hall reading a book. Or, sometimes I imagine walking in the woods with Rick and the smell of the snow. I remember it as a very relaxing thing. But at the time, I actually felt very busy...the difference, I suppose, is that in retrospect I know that I got all my work done on time, so the memory is missing the anxiety that I felt when I was actually reading all those books and taking those walks.

As I've said, Charlie spent most of the winter living on campus, but I hardly ever saw him. He was actively avoiding students, resting from a long season of being almost constantly available.  If I did spot him, he would usually just wave and walk on without speaking. Before disappearing, though, he gave me two assignments.

First, he gave me a list of books to read--twenty of them, I think. I had to write short reviews of all of them and an essay when I was done. The process was quite similar to some independent study structures I've heard of--I believe Goddard uses something similar--except with those structures the whole point is to allow the student to design his or her own syllabus, whereas Charlie simply assigned me books he thought I should read. It worked out to about one and a half books a week, but I am a fast reader and Charlie knew it. I had to be done before classes started in March. He did not just give me titles, though. He actually gave me the books out of his personal collection. I'd get five at a time from Sharon at the front desk and then return them to her when I was done. Within a day or two he would have dropped off the next batch for me. I went through everything from the Bhagevad Gita to Sand Country Almanac that winter, all the books that I had correctly guessed Charlie considered spiritual texts when I'd looked at his bookshelves so many months before.

But Charlie had not just read and reread those books; he had also written in them. He was one of those people who likes to talk back to books, writing responses to the author as though the author would be able to read and respond to them. I've never seen the point of such notations. My parents taught me never to write in or damage a book, and I've never gotten over that injunction. But I'm glad Charlie had the habit. He never mentioned his notations, but he did seem insistent that I read those copies specifically, so I'm sure he meant for me to see his writing. The thing is, Charlie was not giving me information so much as showing me how to think in a certain way. It's not that he wanted me to have the same thoughts as himself, but thinking is an action, and he was giving me his thoughts to copy so that I could learn how to use certain parts of my mind better. Kit gave her dance students exercises to work on for the same reason. Charlie never told me that's what he was doing, and at that point in my life I was still so passive that I don't think I really noticed how dictatorial he was really being until much later. But I did read his notations and his reactions to the books shaped my own. The notes were rarely complete messages, and they were not always legible. His handwriting was not bad, but he sometimes read outside on his balcony until his hands were numb and stiff from cold. Other times he had a lot to say and wrote very small, curving his lines this way and that to take advantage of any remaining space on the page. Sometimes a note would consist of only a word or two;
 "says YOU!"
"Oh, yeah? Well, what about Fouts?"
 "RIGHT!"
 Or sometimes just an exclamation point. Sometimes I could see evidence of evolving ideas, where some flippant rejection would be crossed out and replaced by "oh, of course. I see." And I'd spend the rest of the day trying to figure out what it was he'd seen.

The other assignment was to learn how to track. Rick taught me. Rick had learned some of his tracking skills from Charlie, but he'd also had other teachers and was a true master. Snow is not necessary for tracking, and I can now track well without it, but snow catches very clear sign and is a good way to start, so after every snow that winter, Rick took me out and worked with me. By the time Spring came, I could teach the basic tracking workshops myself--a good thing, too, as Charlie's annual spring cold kept him from doing it.

Looking back, I was so busy...but it was not the same kind of busy that threatens me now. Now, I've got five or six balls in the air at any time, and there is always more that I'd like to do than time in which to do things. I know people who have it worse. But no matter how much of my time way occupied those years at the school, there was never any question that it was possible for me to get everything done if I applied myself. And there was nothing at all that I had to do other than school work and doing my cleaning chores. My life had a unity to it that I miss and that I associate with youth. I think some part of that unity was what Charlie was after, though, he and the others who wear the Green Ring.

Just a month or so now to when I restart this blog at its new address.

Turkeys

My last post was completely ridiculous. Obviously I was upset, and I wasn't prepared for it, so I gave vent to my upset in public. As a writer, such naked prose is embarrassing, but there is no reason for me to make an indiscretion worse by being equally confessional about my embarrassment. No, the reason I bring this up at all is that Charlie would not approve of my anger at cancer itself. He would ask what sets cancer apart from any other sometimes deadly illness. He would know that my anger is not so much with cancer but with death, and death, as he often said in one way or another, is necessary. If individuals did not die, the cycle of matter through ecosystems would stop. Life depends on the occasional ending of lives, and it was to life that Charlie always directed his loyalty--and mine. It is not that he did not grieve if he lost somebody--it was not that he did not want things for himself and his friends. It was that underneath that personal wanting was an awareness of something larger, and he did not confuse not getting what he wanted--however precious or valid the desire--with a violation of some law of the universe. Charlie would not be angry at cancer now. As his student--and, in a sense, his biographer--I am responsible for representing him accurately, and to you, who know nothing else of me, I represent him in my person. That's the job I signed up for. That's what I will continue to do.

I just realized this is the first major holiday where I cannot describe how we celebrated it at school. Thanksgiving, I mean. The reason is simple; we did not celebrate Thanksgiving on campus at all. We all went home, or, at least I always did, and I think everybody else did, too. Eventually I learned there was a tradition where if anybody didn't have a family to go to someone else would bring them home for the holiday. That first Thanksgiving I just went home to my parents for a few days. I'd been home a few times since starting home, but usually my big brother would be gone or something else would be going on. I think Thanksgiving was the first time since I'd moved out that we all spent several days together. It was nice.

But as was starting to happen more and more often, I felt slightly out of sync with the rest of my family. The reason, this time, was almost silly and certainly trivial; everyone else was excited about turkey, but I'd just had some a few weeks earlier before the end of the semester. We ate a lot of meat on campus towards the end of the year, just as we were largely vegetarian at the beginning of the year. In addition to the animals we raised ourselves, Charlie and some of his students hunted. I'm not sure how legal this was, since I don't recall any attention paid to hunting seasons or licenses--campus was always a world unto itself, and most people behaved as though it was outside of the jurisdiction of the mundane world outside. My first year or so, mostly the hunters were Rick and Charlie, and they brought in everything from woodchucks and squirrels to deer. Anything of any size they gave to the dining hall, but a single wild turkey was not a meal for everybody; campus usually needed three, for everyone to get some. So if Charlie killed just one turkey at a time, it was given instead to one of the dorms. You guessed a number between one and one hundred, and maybe got a turkey for Friday dorm dinner. My dorm had won right before Samhain. We roasted it and served it with roasted vegetables from the farm.

I suppose that turkey's flock-mates were angry about it.

Off on a Tangent.

I was listening to "This American Life" today, and what I heard has been on my mind all day.

"This American Life," in case you are not aware of it, is a radio program on NPR. I've become a fan in recent years. They do long-form documentary-type stories, usually two to three in an hour. They vary from funny to heartbreaking to frankly disturbing, sometimes within the same story, but always with some central quality of which comedy and tragedy are simply alternate expressions...heart, I think I'd call it.

Anyway, this one episode today I'd classify as merely interesting except for the train of thought it triggered in me that has been with me, as I said, all day.

I was doing the dishes and not really listening when someone said something about being interested in "secret knowledge." My ears perked up and I turned off the water to listen, because secret knowledge is, in some sense, the heart of magic. We used to talk about this a lot at school, what magic is and why one thing is called magic and another isn't. I won't go into the details now, except to say that this is one of those questions that is productive, if you are interested in such things. I later went online to get the podcast so I could listen to the whole show from the beginning. Here is the link for the podcast, in case you want to listen to it yourself;

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

Here is the synopsis--spoiler alert, I'm going to have to give away the ending.

A professor of music read about a man who claimed to have cured cancer using some sort of device. The man had long ago been discredited as a quack, but the music professor thought the device might have actually worked, so he built one and found that it did kill certain kinds of cells. He teamed up with a friend of his, a cancer researcher, to test the device on cancer cells and captured impressive pictures and video of leukemia cells and pancreatic cancer cells dying--this was all in petri dishes or something, not in an actual patient. The machine plus chemotherapy drugs killed a lot more cancer than the drugs alone. But the results were not consistent and there were some problems about test design and eventually the two men argued and stopped working together.

The thing that struck me at first was the music professor saying he was attracted to "secret knowledge, things people don't know, or maybe people used to know and have forgotten." This attraction to what nobody else knows is the attraction of conspiracy theories, but it is also the attraction of the occult. Much of occult literature these days is actually mostly secrecy (or, rather, secrecy on display, as it is published) with very little secret inside it; the romance and glamor of magic is the hidden meaning, the secret  sigil, the arcane languages and powerful practices that only the initiates know. That is what attracted this music teacher to the work of a supposed quack, the thought that here was a special something that not everybody had access to--a powerful secret that could change the world. As some of you may know, cancer is very difficult to treat, and the two most powerful treatments for inoperable cancers, radiation and chemotherapy, both cause almost as much illness as the cancer does. In fact, both can cause cancer. The idea behind aggressive cancer treatment today is still mostly that you poison the patient and hope his cancer dies before the rest of him does. A machine that kills cancer cells--only cancer cells--would be a miracle. It would be magic.

But whether the anti-cancer machine really works or not, the secret language understandable only by initiates really does exist, and the music professor isn't an initiate of this secret society. It's called science. I am an initiate; I have a master's degree in conservation biology. So I heard this researcher on the radio explaining why he couldn't accept the anti-cancer machine as proven...and I heard him correctly, as he meant to be heard. Let me see if I can explain this briefly.

Strange things happen all the time, and they happen for all sorts of reasons. Cells are born, they change, and they die, and often no one knows why. There may be no reason. But we humans like reason and we see it even where it isn't there. Once, when I was nine years old a buddy of mine and I were riding our bikes past my house. I thought it was weird to be riding past my own house and not stop, though I'd done it hundreds of times before. But just as I thought that this orange cat ran out into the street in front of me and startled me. I fell right off my bike and hurt myself badly and it's completely illogical, but from that day to this I have avoided passing my own house without stopping if I possibly can. I'll go around the block, if I have to. On some level, I believe that passing my house caused the accident. And we're all like that. We see patterns that aren't there. What science is--science is a way of telling the difference between patterns that are there and patterns that are not there. It isn't enough to watch the cancer cells dying, just like it isn't enough that I felt myself fall off my bike. Both incontrovertibly happened. But so what? Stuff  happens. And without the scientific process, you can't tell the difference between stuff just happening and the evidence of a new and real pattern. You can't tell the difference between signal and noise.

And that's what the researcher meant; he was excited about the possibility of curing cancer, but to him, the videos of dying cancer weren't proof. Since the experiments had not been done properly, there was no way to know if he was looking at the equivalent of my nine-year-old's superstition, an emotionally powerful illusion, or the next big breakthrough. But the music professor, being an initiate of something else entirely, didn't hear it that way. To him, the effectiveness of the machine was the obvious thing, and his friend's insistence on more study was only a demand for more proof with which to convince the skeptical. He was discouraged by what felt like an unreasonable demand for more of what he already had. Science isn't secret in the sense that nobody is allowed to tell; scientists spend their whole lives trying to tell. But in becoming a scientist you gain the ability to see things a different way--and you often lose the ability to see things in the old way. Initiates of different societies, the two men failed to understand each other and they fought and their partnership died.

But I can see it both ways, because before I trained as a scientist I trained as a...shaman might be the best term. Charlie had no word for what he was, and he gave no word to me. And science was for me a part of that larger thing, that greater initiation offered to me by Kit, the music professor and miracle-maker;Allen, the psychologist and master of illusion; Joy, the healer, Greg, the Buddhist alchemist; Karen, who taught me that every time you fall down you learn more and get stronger...and Charlie. We didn't all agree or even necessarily all like each other, but that was precisely the point. And we made something together. They made something and gave it to the world. And these two guys, the ones on the radio show, didn't have that thing and so they fought and their partnership died.

And they never said on the radio show when these events happened. It might have been many years ago now. That means that, were it not for that argument, there might be a cure for pancreatic cancer today. I'm sorry, I don't usually use this language, but I'm in no mood today for perspective.

Fuck cancer.

Interlude

It's strange how November does not seem very different than October did. The trees are bare now, and both Sandy and the election are in the past rather than the future, but basically my life goes on as before. I work, I eat, I sleep, and I watch my wife gradually wax like the moon. At school there was such a dramatic difference, because classes were over for the year and so many people went away. And I remember, mostly, it being dark. It couldn't have been dark all the time, of course, but that's what I remember, especially from that first November on campus. Just playing chess, reading, or studying by the woodstove in the Great Hall while outside it was dark and cold enclosing night. I'd finished an academic year; in just over two months, I'd cease to be a yearling. I'd be able to quit zazen, if I wanted to. I'd probably have to quit group therapy, since the new students would have first dibs on the limited space. I'd probably be able to quit my job as a janitor and go work for Charlie--I forgot to say earlier, but one of the reasons I didn't apply to the groundskeeping team to begin with was that Charlie gave first consideration to second-years. In any case, there was this gap in the year, a time of quiet, a time to think about the future and the past. I didn't even have Charlie around telling me what to do. He was on campus, for he had no other home, but I hardly ever saw him. He spent most of his time in the woods, I think, resting from his year of being available to others. The Masters actually had a secret stairwell so they could come in and go up to their rooms without the students crossing paths with them. Despite having been a janitor, I didn't find out about that stairwell until later, though sometimes we heard one or another of them taking their secret way behind the walls. Most of us just assumed the Mansion was haunted, an added romance to the place.

Why do I persist in thinking my life should follow the same rhythms it did in the past? I don't wake up surprised to be married, surprised to be making a living, or surprised to be thirty-two years old. Why do I catch myself continually surprised that I am not on campus? Maybe it's just that I've been working on this blog that my mind goes wandering and gets lost in time.

I'm really looking forward to the next phase of this blog, when I start telling this story in the detail I should have used from the beginning. Of course, writing that will probably make me even more discombobulated, but I do not write this account just for me. It is a duty I owe. I remember, years ago--it wasn't my first year, I think I was actually getting ready to graduate, I complained to Charlie that I didn't think I had found myself yet. Charlie typically sought sarcasm at such moments.

"I didn't know you had lost yourself," he deadpanned. "You should try looking in the mirror."

I ignored him and explained that I'd always thought that going to college--especially attending a pagan seminary--I would "find myself," whatever that was supposed to mean. But however much I'd learned and changed over the years, one thing hadn't changed. I still felt unimportant to myself, insubstantial. I'd always felt that way. I'd always been more or less happy, more or less popular, more or less successful at everything I did--except regular college, which I failed, but of course that was different. Leaving that place didn't feel like a failure anymore, it felt like a brilliant and miraculous success. But I'd always felt like that guy no one could ever quite remember. What's-his-name. I'd thought that would change when I grew up. It hadn't. Charlie thought for a moment.

"Tell me, then, what have you found, if you have not found yourself?" he asked.

"Other people," I answered, without hesitation. "You, Rick, Ollie, Kit, Allen, my other friends...the land here. I'm not sure I ever loved anything before. But I love this place." He nodded.

"Yes, that was the idea. Daniel, did you know most spiritual practitioners actually spend years and years trying to lose themselves?" I shook my head. Of course I had heard about surrendering the ego, letting go of the little self in order to find the big Self, that sort of thing. But I'd never connected that to my persistent sense of having no clear idea what I wanted or what I was good for.  Charlie continued. "Spiritual enlightenment, for lack of a better term, is not about changing yourself. It's certainly not about becoming perfect. You're already perfect, because God made you. It's about lightening up on yourself, on who you are, and finding a way to be useful anyway."

"How do I be useful, then?" I asked. But Charlie said he didn't know. Only I could find my work. "But I feel," I protested, "like I'm just watching life go by. That's what I've always done." It was this secret despair, the same feeling that had brought me to the seminary years earlier. And from the bottom at that despair I hoped, and half expected, that Charlie could work some magic and fix me. But even wizards, even geniuses, are just men.

"You watch life go by and you write about it," Charlie corrected me.  "And maybe that's what you should do. Maybe think of becoming clear, like a crystal? Like a lens that focuses light, without imposing any blemish or distortion of its own."

"How?" I asked.

"Knock," Charlie answered. "Knock and keep knocking. This isn't something you do on your own. You get ready and you knock. Throw yourself at the door, and keep throwing. And if God sees fit to show up, God will answer you."

Charlie hardly ever mentioned God. Half the time, I thought he was an atheist. When he did mention God, it was always important, and something in his voice was nonnegotiable, unquestionable. And in the end, it was Charlie who gave me my charge, telling me that, should anything happen, I was free to write his story. He's not the only one who asked me to be Chronicler, but he was the first.

Twelve Years Ago

Huh. So Obama won, among many other items of current news. This blog is not political per se, so I don't want to get into my opinion of any of these races or ballot measures...I do have opinions. I vote, and I was modestly active this time around, contributing my money and my time to various causes, but that is not my point, here.

My point is that I'm remembering that twelve years ago, my first year at the school, was also an election year. And it's a very visceral memory, for some reason.

As I said, most of the campus closed down November 1st and a lot of the students and staff left campus for the break. I stayed on campus, because I didn't have anywhere else to go besides my parents' house, and I didn't feel like living with my parents for three months. They lived pretty close by, so I could do short visits whenever I wanted to. We cooked in the Great Hall kitchen, or in our dorms, did chores around campus, and read a lot. A few people did make-up work from courses they had failed earlier in the year.

And I had not paid a whole lot of attention to the election. I had just turned twenty, so I suppose I was not in the habit of electoral politics, and anyway campus was so much a separate world. We did not watch TV, and rarely listened to the radio or went online. It's not that we didn't have access to information, but we weren't constantly listening to the talking heads or watching campaign adds. All those things you think you absorb by osmosis--which movies are coming out, which brands are cool, which news stories are important--it turns out you don't get any of that if you don't watch TV. There is, instead, a great, restful, silence. And I wasn't used to reaching beyond that yet, either. I had just turned twenty. I was used to whatever I needed to deal with simply imposing itself on me, through teachers, parents, or the ever-present media. It takes time to adapt to change. So I'd registered and I'd voted, but I didn't have a huge investment in the results. I went to bed that night as normal, mildly surprised that there was no winner yet. The next morning I got up, meditated, brushed my teeth and so forth, and went down to the Great Hall and toasted a bagel on the woodstove. And I picked up the paper. And there was no president yet.

You remember what happened next, I'm sure; weeks of arguing and uncertainty over hanging and dimpled chads and finally the Supreme Court and President George W. Bush. For most of that time--that whole administration--I was aware of politics only intermittently, as though I had gone to another country. I was distracted by my school work, certainly. I have had to learn to be involved.

And I have learned. But to this day, when I think of election returns, I also think of the taste of bagels.