Afterword: Post 3: The Sword Dance

After Charlie’s diagnosis, I made an effort to come to campus more often than I had in months. Partly I wanted to get to know the new students so that I would not seem a stranger when I began teaching the next year, but of course I wanted to spend time with Charlie while I could. He resisted my attempts, saying he didn’t need my neediness to remind him he was dying. A fair point, especially as I saw plenty of other people seeking his attention for the same reason, but I’m embarrassed to admit he had to tell me more than once.

On one of those occasions, in a rare moment of more obvious kindness, he explained to me that what I was trying to do wouldn’t work anyway.

“What I’m trying to do?”

“Yeah, you’re trying to save me up for later. But there is no saving up for later, just as there is no making up for lost time in the past. There is only only this moment we’re in now.”

Eventually we returned to our old habit of lunch once a week, most weeks.

Being on campus often also allowed me to spend more time with the other masters and to check in with Steve, who was then on track to claim his ring next Brigid—and I could see why. He seemed, not wiser in any definable way, but happier, more up-beat, more solid. Even his sadness, his anger, his fear, had developed a relaxed clarity.

I had no particular role on campus, so I spent a lot of time wandering around, exploring the progress of the autumn, and bumping into people and chatting. Often, Rick and Raven G. would be there also, bringing themselves up to speed to take over Charlie’s forestry, hunting, and landscaping duties. In fact, Rick had taken over hunting already. The three of us, too, would have lunch once a week.

From the others, from Allen and Kit, Greg and Joy (Karen and I continued to barely talk, though there has never been anything acrimonious between us), I heard stories. I learned that Joy had been the one to insist Charlie go to the doctor when she noticed him turn yellow—the first major metastasis was in his liver, which is typical for pancreatic cancer. I also learned that Greg, who, remember, no longer had any classes, had volunteered to take Charlie to all his appointments and treatments and so forth. It perpetually surprised me that Greg could drive (past-tense now only because Greg doesn’t drive anymore—he’s still with us), he’s so all but literally monastic, but Charlie’s driving was bad at the best of times and he needed company.

Allen told me of coming upon Greg and Charlie just as they were coming home from the first of these outings, seeing Greg drop Charlie off near the front of the Mansion before taking the car back to its lot. Allen hurried up to ask how things had gone and found Charlie in something of an emotional tizzy. They started to talk before Charlie realized that somebody might be able to over-hear him.

“Get me out of here!” he pleaded, so Allen took him out to the Edge of the World, where there is no cover behind which someone might lurk unseen without meaning to. But once out there, he wouldn’t unburden himself either, insisting that he had no time left for self-pity. Allen disagreed.

“This is grief,” he explained, bluntly, “and grief is a necessary form of psychological adjustment. Under the circumstances, I’d say you have no time left to avoid it.”

Charlie stopped quite still.

“I’m glad,” he said, “that my best friend is a psychologist and can think for me.” They had been walking slowly along, and Charlie started walking again, but Allen didn’t. After a moment, Charlie looked back at him.

“I didn’t realize I was your best friend,” Allen said.

“You’re not. I meant some other psychologist around here,” Charlie grumped, and Allen laughed and they walked on together. But Allen—what he told me later was:

“I really didn’t know. I should have. We work together, we all but live together—I don’t think we’ve gone more than a day without talking since sometime in 1987—he’s helped raise my kids—of course I’m his best friend, me and Greg, and he’s mine, along with Kit and Lo. But I didn’t think about it because I didn’t have to think about it. He was always just there. And now?”

Allen could be of no help to the rest of us in our grief processes. He needed us to help him instead.

Another person joined the team in those months—Nora. I don’t mean my friend, Nora, the bee-keeping witch, I mean Nora the medical student. I’ve mentioned her, back when she was a novice. She was close with Charlie then, which I noticed and puzzled at, as she wasn’t his student, but she and I had never really talked much. In the years since, she had graduated, first from our program and then from medical school. Midway through the residency process, though, she had stopped, saying she was exhausted and something was missing. She had returned as a candidate in order to find out what that “something might be. She had come as Joy’s student, but Joy was not giving her much in the way of direction, having decided that Nora’s own ideas for her future needed to be allowed to bubble up. Charlie disagreed.

Nora had been talking to Charlie about her ideas and her options when he suddenly said “I think you need to lose a patient.”

It took her, she told me, about a minute to realize what he was talking about. Pedagogically, he meant that she needed to go through the trauma of seeing a patient in her care die, and she needed to do it within the caring environment of the school so that the experience could be transformable rather than merely survivable. She would be set up to fail, much as Eddie had been. Practically and personally, of course, Charlie meant himself as her patient.

She did not become his doctor—she’s not an oncologist, for one thing—but she became his primary caregiver. She learned of all aspects of his treatment and kept track of his progress, asked questions of his doctors that he didn’t know to ask, made sure the efforts of the entire team stayed coordinated and sensible, and fought his insurance provider when he was too tired to do it himself. What home nursing care he ended up needing, she agreed to provide. She learned a holistic approach to healing, not in terms of methodology (she tends still to refer to most forms of alternative medicine as “woo”) but in terms of treating the patient as a whole person, an entire organism, a system, rather than as a collection of inter-related and sometimes broken parts.

And Charlie talked with her about his experience as I believe he talked to no one else. He had to, to help her, and I think that made it easier for him.

For the rest of October and into November, Charlie seemed normal, albeit physically weak and easily tired. Those who had been around him over the summer said he actually seemed healthier—he was no longer yellow, for one thing, and when he wasn’t fresh from a treatment he seemed more energetic, more focused, even happier. He felt better, clearly.

Around the middle of December, though, he started to slide ever so slightly. He started losing weight again and complained of strange pains. He said he could not sleep well. A yearling told me she’d heard a noise on her way in to the Mansion through the Green Room and found Charlie sitting on the stairs looking surprised. She wondered if he had fallen. He never said anything about it to anyone.

We heard that his chemo had stopped working. They switched him to a different chemotherapy agent and he sprang back, but not to where he’d been before.

I missed Samhain on campus—June and I had a small celebration on our own—but I made a point of attending at Yule, and for the first time joined the all-night party up on the masters’ floor. By chance, I was the only one up there who wasn’t either of the Six or immediate family of the same. Even the various non-teaching masters all had somewhere else to be, though they all planned to join us the next day. It was a very cozy gathering. I’d always wondered what those Yule parties were like, and I wasn’t disappointed, though mostly it was pretty low-key. There was a lot of good food, good drink (most of it non-alcoholic), and music, some of it recorded, much of it live. Mostly we sat around and talked or played Pictionary. They had a little Yule tree up there, a live balsam fir in a pot that I learned spent most of the winter outside in a little courtyard garden they have. Its ornaments were a mix of beloved holiday heirlooms from the families of the masters themselves.

As the night began to shift from late to early, though, Charlie stood up and everyone got quiet. I remembered having heard that he made it a practice to go out to greet the dawn much earlier than the others—the Six are always up on the mountain before the students get there, and it is they who play “Here Comes the Sun” over and over and over as the sun comes up, but dawn comes in stages and sun-up is only the final stage. The gradual lightening starts much earlier, and the first stage has already begun by the time most begin their climb—most of the Six don’t arrive more than a few minutes before the students do. But Charlie had made it his practice to go up much earlier, to be in place before the beginning of “astronomical twilight,” which is when the stars barely start to dim before the coming sun—which won’t be up for almost another two hours. And since Charlie wanted to be in place before that, he’d go out even earlier, leaving the Mansion to climb the mountain sometime around five A.M.

Only—and this was clear in the sudden silence—no one was sure he was strong enough to climb a mountain in the dark and the cold, nobody liked the idea of his attempting to do so alone, and no one had any idea what to say to him about it.

Except me.

I opened my mouth and said the first thing that came to me; “Charlie, can I come with you? I want to see what it’s like.”

And I did. I was still in some sense his student and maybe I’ll always be. If he was going somewhere, I wanted to follow. And while I had another motive for asking, and I saw in his face that he knew it and understood what I was trying to do, but I was not being disingenuous. And so he accepted and let me look after both his person and his pride.

“It’ll be silence after we leave this room,” he warned me.

“I figured. I just need to change my clothes.”

Before we could make our way out of the little group of couches and people, though, Kit stood up. I had been peripherally aware that she’d been breathing heavily and staring fixedly into space ever since Charlie stood, like someone trying to nerve themselves up to do something scary. Now, she stood up abruptly, violin in hand, and Charlie and I both sat down, expectant.

She played “The Sword Dance,” the musical component of a Morris dance associated with the winter solstice. It’s on the “Christmas Revels” album, which despite the name is mostly about Yule, and it’s an album all of us were thoroughly familiar with, since we on campus play the recording often and perform selections from it more often than that. And we all knew that the tune is preceded on the album by a few spoken lines:

“First comes Christmas, then comes spring;

Like winter I must die.

Then to life again, like spring!

Dance, men, the Sword Dance now for me!”

It’s a curious thing, this Sword Dance, since it ends with a simulated decapitation, a voluntary sacrifice presumably meant to identify the tribal chief with the cycles of the Earth and Sun, thing thing that dies and yet comes back, and in dying and coming back lives forever. In playing the song, Kit suggested the lyric and with it a whole complex of metaphysical ideas and emotional association that none of us needed to have explained—we all knew it. The experience was as immediate for us as if a Christian preacher had held aloft a Cross, meaning to invoke everything the Cross represents.

The dance involves the clashing of swords, heard on the recording as periods of rhythmic percussion. We spontaneously added that sound by clapping in time at the correct points. None of us said anything, we all just clapped along, and Charlie did nothing at all except listen and look slightly stunned.

When we were done, he stood, looked at Kit and then the rest of us.

“Thank you,” he said.

Afterward: Post 2: Research and Insults

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

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

Somebody followed me.

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

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

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

Really, I felt touched.

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

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

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

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

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

I jumped in after him.

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

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

"You're a cocky upstart."

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

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

"Yeah!" I threw leaves at him.

"Get out! Go!" more leaves.

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

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

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

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

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

"Idiot!"

"Fool!"

"Nincompoop!"

"Twat-waffle!"

"Egg-head!"

"Shit-for-brains!"

"Ass-munch!"

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

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

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

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

"I got nothin," I admitted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterword: Post 1: Diagnosis

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

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

Fair enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here goes.

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

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

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

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

And then….

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

Come to campus today. Ch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We all admitted we were, indeed, frozen.

"Then let's get the hell inside."

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

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

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

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

"We trust you," added Charlie.

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

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

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

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

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

"What can you play?" he asked.

 I shrugged.

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

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

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

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

Mastery Year 3: Part 8: Post 7: Brigid

The day dawns when everything changes: Brigid.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allen answered, and bowed us inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We each said our names.

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

"What do you want?" Kit asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I can," I said.

"Good. You remember what to say?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

"What do you seek?" he asked me.

"I seek my Mastery," I told him.

"Why do you seek it?"

"Because it is mine."

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

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

Mastery Year 3: Part 8: Post 6: The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End

Well, as promised, the schedule for the graduating candidates for the next few days has been released. They gave it to Raven G., and she gave it to the rest of us and explained what's going on. It's not the first information we got on the subject, either. We'd all heard--from Raven--back around Yule to be back on campus the week before Brigid. We also got our fingers measured for our rings then. Charlie was right: mind games are for novices.

The five of us who hope to receive our rings, Ebony, Veery, Raven G., Eddie, and I, have to each interview for jobs as masters. Passing the interview is a necessary step--the necessary step--to earning a ring, and it means we're qualified for a permanent position here, should one open up. It means we're masters. We knew all that before, of course. What we learned this week was that the interviews would be today and tomorrow. Usually the decision is made in the interview, by the interviewing committee, although they say they reserve the right to delay making a decision--they'll let us know, at the latest, tomorrow night.

Raven even had some advice for us--to come to the interview ready to make the case for our being hired, with any necessary documentation in hand, since we'd be expected to begin with a presentation, not simply given given questions to answer. There would be no black-out bags, no surprises, and no tricks. But, as Charlie warned me at Samhain, the interviews would be quite real. None of us had ever heard of anyone making it to the interview but not getting a ring, but Raven had been told to tell us that it Could happen.

My interview was this morning, one of the first two on the schedule.

Since I had to go over to Chapel Hall right after breakfast, I got all my things together before going downstairs for the day. June was sitting in bed, still in her pajamas, as I put on my uniform with exaggerated care. I wanted everything to be perfect, as though a crooked cowl or an improperly tied belt might be enough to make me bomb the interview and waste everything I'd done.

I took a long, ragged breath.

"Daniel?" June asked.

"I don't know that I want to do this," I told her. "I'm not sure I believe that I can or that I should. I don't feel like a master."

"You'll have to make up your mind," June told me.

"Yes," I said, but I didn't want to move. The truth is I didn't want to leave. I felt like I was dressing for my own funeral.

"Daniel, do you ever feel like shit?" my wife asked me. I turned to look at her, surprised and a little confused.

"Yes, I guess so."

"Are you ever actually shit? As in feces?"

"No."

"Well, then, seems to me your feelings have nothing to do with it. Not feeling like a master has nothing to do with your being one. Now, do you want that ring or not?"

I thought about it. I wanted to be sure.

"Yes."

"Then go."

So I went.

I left my room with the nerved-up confidence of a Man on a Mission, but I still had breakfast to get through, which took forever, especially as I arrived a little early for it. The Great Hall is unadorned, now, the austere lack-of-decoration that is the "look" of Brigid around here. The room was clean and very bright, with sun reflecting off the new snow outside and shining in at the windows, and with people starting to come back from the winter break, the place was crowded and noisy. I had nothing to say to anyone, though I made eye contact with Veery, who would interview at the same time as I but with a different committee. She wasn't talking, either, but she looked more cheerful than I felt.

Finally, the Time Arrived. I hefted my bag of documentation and headed over to Chapel Hall. The interview was in one of the offices on the ground floor there--the Chapel itself is on the second floor. I found my committee waiting for me: Charlie, Allen, Sharon, and Karen. They saw me poke my head in and beckoned me and greeted me warmly.

"I guess that's one question I forgot to ask," I said, taking my seat.

"Oh?" said Sharon.

"For my project getting to know the school. How do you decide who's on these committees?"

"I was wondering if you'd ask," said Allen, merrily.

"Don't worry; we won't dock you for the oversight," said Charlie.

"We're those who know you best and those who know you least," explained Sharon.

"That last would be me," put in Karen. It's true I've hardly had a a conversation with her the whole time I've been here.

"Hi, Karen," I said, a little embarrassed, and she waved her fingers at me in a girlish way.

Sharon cleared her throat.

"OK, I've got everything all prepared and planned out," I said, "except the beginning. How do I start?"

That made them laugh.

"Begin anywhere," Charlie said, "and proceed. Where you start is where the beginning is."

"Why are you here?" Allen offered as a hint.

"Well," I started, "I'm here because I want to earn my ring and I am, as far as I can tell, ready. And I'm here because I arrived ten years ago. I arrived because I wanted to learn to engage more deeply and more meaningfully with life, because I wanted community, and because I wanted wonder. And I got those things. Now, I'm in a position to help other people get those things. So, um, I'm here."

It was an awkward version of the speech I'd thought up earlier. It made the others smile a little. They've all been here, done this. I took a deep breath and I continued.

I explained the general course of my studies, starting with my novitiate--speaking mostly to Karen, who might genuinely not know my history--including how and why I'd chosen Charlie, how I've changed over the course of my studies, what I did during my Absence, what assignments Charlie has given me since I've been back, and what classes and workshops I've taught, noting those I've developed myself or with Rick.

I handed out copies of the syllabi and course plans for my various workshops and classes and the proposal I'd submitted to start offering tutoring in writing and in algebra and statistics. I also handed out copies of reviews I've gotten from students for the work, and records of how many students had signed up to work with me. I handed over copies of the testimonial I'd thought to have Steve write about my work with him, together with a report I'd written up about his progress when I turned his education back over to Charlie. I verbally summarized what I saw as my potential strengths as a master and what areas of school function I might be able to take on, if called to do so. I said I thought I might be able to take on landscaping, though I acknowledged Raven or Rick would be a better choice.

"I could be a good craft-master," I said, "but my craft would primarily be writing."

And I handed over a copy of my book of poems, a copy of the literary journal I'd co-edited in grad school, and testimonials from students I had tutored. I also handed over a copy my report on how the school runs, explained that project, and made a few comments on what I'd learned from it and how I thought the school might possibly be improved--and changes I thought we should be on the look-out to avoid.

"Not that none of you know this stuff," I acknowledged. "The point is I noticed."

I talked on in a semi-organized and well-documented way in my properly-straightened and correctly-belted uniform for about twenty minutes, and then I kind of sputtered to a halt.

"I guess the only other thing I didn't plan out was the ending," I said. "Everything I've thought of sounds cheese, vote Daniel TODAY kind of thing." I blushed. They all laughed.

Then they asked me a few questions. Karen asked the most. Unlike the interview at the end of my novitiate--which was partially a pretext for my ritual kidnapping--they didn't have me tell them things they obviously already knew. The point was not to tell them what I had done and learned but why what I had done and learned qualified me to teach. They had asked for documentation not in order to make me prove myself, but simply because even Charlie and Allen had forgotten or not known relevant parts of my history and wanted to be able to look things up easily. My bringing my records were a courtesy to them, a way of making it easier for them to help me.

I think we were there about another twenty minutes, asking and answering and clarifying, passing papers and books back and forth, before Charlie looked up over his reading glasses and said "well? Do we need to discuss this privately?"

"I don't," replied Allen. "I've wanted him on board for years, now. What do you think, Karen? Are we being biased?"

"Not as far as I can tell," she said. "Neither of you are the type. And I've never heard anything negative about him."

"It might help to consider," ventured Sharon, "what else we would want to see from him? If he's not ready yet, what could he do to get ready?"

I held my breath.

"You always say that," grumbled Charlie.

"Always when it seems helpful," acknowledged Sharon.

"Well, I can't think of anything," said Allen. "He's done everything, or close, anyway."

"If we don't give it to him now," said Charlie, "he's just going to keep doing more of what he's been doing. My thinking is he should be a master while he's doing it."

My heart leaped a little, and Charlie glanced at me and smiled a little, as if he knew. Maybe he did.

"Karen?" asked Sharon.

"I'm good," she said.

"Well, then," said Sharon, who seemed to be in charge, "I believe we are in agreement. And the committee of the whole left us no concerns, so we are empowered in his case...."

"Congratulations," said Charlie and shook my hand.

I felt like whooping for joy, but instead I said nothing at all. I felt completely muddled up. We all stood up, and Sharon reminded me of the time to meet for the pre-commencement ceremony. I'm at liberty until then, apparently. I felt hollow and full at once.

I left, but the others didn't follow me. I don't know why. Maybe I'll ask? Asking why seems to be something I do, now.

Out in the hallway, I met Kit, who had been on Veery's committee, which had apparently finished up a little before mine. She looked like she had been waiting for me.

"Well?" she asked.

I stammered, vaguely.

"I know," she said. "When I passed mine I felt like weeping."

Mastery Year 3: Part 8: Post 5: Success

I did it! I did it! I did it!

I snuck up on Charlie! He'd asked me to, of course, but I did it for real. I surprised him.

I had discovered that though he is very aware of everything around him, he tends not to look behind him much--if he sees a place and notices it's unoccupied, then passes it, he doesn't check behind him visually to see if it has become occupied in the last ten seconds. He does listen, though, and keep track of animal behavior and so forth. The question was how to take advantage of that?

I've been watching him, and in addition to noticing where he puts his attention, I've also learned his habits. He doesn't have many--he makes a point of not falling into unthinking ruts, not going on autopilot when he can help it. But he does have a few, patterns of behavior that are fairly consistent because they make sense. And this winter, he'd developed a new one. His laptop died and he hasn't replaced it yet, so he's been going to the computer lab for an hour or two a day. And because he's trying to avoid students (all the masters do at this time of year), he does it when we we're all eating dinner, since then we're pretty reliably all clustered in the Great Hall and the adjacent Bird Room and Great Hall Kitchen. He walks up to the front door in the office, usually from the direction of the greenhouse, and goes into the office and from there into the computer lab without entering the Great Hall. And he does it around 5:30, sometimes a little earlier. It's almost dark when he comes, probably because he wants to be hard to see. Of course he does not use a flashlight.

Yesterday, I waited for him.

I took advantage of the darkness, standing almost behind one of the columns of the porch off the office. I could see him because he was moving, but I did not move, so he didn't see me.

When he turned to come up the steps, the column was momentarily between us, so I silently shifted my position so that when he passed me I'd be behind the column. Once he passed, I silently shifted back, putting myself in full view, illuminated by light shining through the windows in the office door--if only he'd looked behind him. He didn't.

"Hello, Charlie," I said, as he opened the office door.

He actually visibly startled.

"Daniel. You got me," he acknowledged, and then went inside without turning around.

In the morning, as I went out for my walk, he caught up with me.

"I suppose I ought to try to sneak up on you, now," he said. "Just to see if you can keep me from doing it."

The original assignment was not only to sneak up on him, but also to make myself un-sneak-up-able by him.

"I'm not convinced you haven't tried," I answered. It's true he hasn't successfully snuck up on me since he gave me the assignment. I can't prove that he was trying--I never spotted him literally tip-toeing along behind me, but of course that's not his method--but that doesn't mean he wasn't. Anyway, my suggestion made him laugh. "I'm sure you can," I added. "I'm not better than you are. But I think you'd find me harder to sneak up on than I used to be. I know where you aren't."

"Good enough for me," he said. "Remember to be aware of other people, too."

And he bid me good morning and left. I suppose he's busy starting to prepare for graduation, now. They'll start interviewing graduating novices in a few days--and whatever happens with graduating candidates will start happening t me.