A Day in the Life

I'm looking over a daily planner of mine from twelve years ago, and I see my schedule written here in my handwriting. There are no notes, no anecdotes, no adjectives, just what I was supposed to do when, but this note I wrote to myself over a decade ago brings all the details coming back to me across the years, even to the scent of farm animals and green things, the hot, sticky evenings of summer, the cool of the morning before the fog burned away. I'll tell you some the details that I wrote down, and some of the details I didn't.

There was meditation in the morning, of course, though in July the sun was already well up by six, so I usually set my alarm for quarter of five and went running before zazen. Breakfast was always a choice of either miso soup or oatmeal, though there were eggs and sometimes sausage, and home made granola and buns, too, and the tables were set with these beautiful little wooden bowls full of toppings for the oatmeal--fresh fruit, sugar, nuts...that June I remember there were blueberries, we grew blueberries on campus, and I think I mostly lived on them.

I didn't have anything scheduled in the mornings that first summer, my classes were all in the afternoon, so after breakfast I'd put in my hours as a janitor and then go about whatever tasks Charlie had set for me. I could, and did, complain almost constantly about all the ridiculous things he was making me do, even though I'd talked him into being my teacher in the first place, and I'd do it again. He was right about the value of a boogie-man; blaming Charlie freed up a lot of my energy that would otherwise have been expended just getting out of bed in the morning. By July he'd let me slack off on counting birds and gotten me into trees. I had to label every tree on campus, I'm not even kidding, I had to make a little label for every one with common name and scientific name, both spelled right. I could look up every one in a guidebook if I wanted to, I didn't have to memorize anything, but it's hard to table a few dozen of this or that tree and not get "white pine, Pinus strobus," or "sugar maple, Acer sacharum" stuck in your head, and of course Charlie knew that. So I'd spend an hour or two labeling trees every morning, cursing Charlie, and then when I was tired of that I'd quit for the day and go hang out with Charlie. I must have been insane.

Charlie did not have classes in the morning in the summer either, except for some elective, I forget what, on Friday. Instead, he supervised the grounds keeping team, gardened, and puttered about. I was still kicking myself for not having joined grounds keeping, so around ten thirty or eleven I'd go find Charlie and help him with whatever he was doing. He couldn't give me a formal assignment, since those were reserved for his actual employees, but he let me tag along and do whatever he was doing, planting, pruning, checking for beetles or aphids or whatever else. It was a lot like when I used to help my Dad in the garden when I was little. Charlie and I didn't talk much while we worked--Charlie never talked much--but it was a companionable sort of thing, and sometimes he would tell me the names of plants or insects, or quiz me, or tell me why he did things one way and not others. The entire campus, I came to understand, was not just landscaped with natives, it was a single, giant, ecological sculpture, his self-taught, ad hoc attempt to garden for habitat the same way Sara gardened for peas or tomatoes. I have no idea if it worked or not, but there did seem to be more birds and more interesting creepy-crawlies than anywhere else I've been. Campus is one of only two places I've ever seen a living luna moth--go Google them, if you want to, they're amazing.

Anyway, when Charlie got hungry, he'd declare lunch time, and we'd go pick up sandwiches in the dining hall. Sometimes we'd eat with Alan or Sara, or Rick, Rick being another of Charlie's students. Sometimes Charlie had a meeting, or maybe an attack of grumpiness, and left me to eat alone. Sometimes the two of us would go eat our sandwiches together out on the meadow where a large building used to be--I think it was student housing or a school building back when the campus was a private boarding school. I guess it burned down in the same fire that damaged the Mansion--that fire is why the school was able to rebuilt the third floor and add a fourth and make the Mansion into the passive solar structure it is today. But where the other building was is just a flat spot with a drop-off at the end, a little grassy cornered cliff. We called it the Edge of the World, and a good place to have lunch.

After lunch, I'd have class--two days a week I had Introduction to History, the Wednesdays were for martial arts with Karen, and Mondays and Fridays I took various workshops and talks. A lot of the talks were for credit, and though you only got a quarter credit per talk, they added up. In the evening...let's see, Monday I did homework, Tuesday was Philosopher's Stone Soup, which I'll tell you about later, Wednesday was group therapy and then Dead Poets Society, Thursday was the Paleolithic Dinner, which I will also tell you about later, and Friday I hung out with my dorm-mates. Over the weekend there were parties, little concerts and poetry readings, and homework. I'm not sure when I slept. Maybe I didn't sleep. I was only nineteen and had energy to burn.

I remember one day, over lunch out on the Edge of the World, I asked Charlie why I had to listen to birds and label trees and so forth. I wasn't complaining, but he was primarily my spiritual master, and while I must have had an intuitive sense of the answer, or I would never have pushed Charlie into teaching me, I wasn't sure what this natural science stuff had to do with finding God. Charlie looked at me a moment before answering, and then asked if I knew him. I didn't know what he meant.

"You know, do you know me? Do you know who I am? Are we friends?"

"Yeah, sure, I guess so," I told him. Were we friends? The word started me, and I was distracted for a moment, wondering. Charlie went on, answering my question with more questions.

"What's my name? My full name," he asked. I told him, middle name included. His eyebrows raised--I don't think he knew I knew his middle name. "How do I make my living?"

"You're a professor at an odd liberal arts college, and you write and publish poetry and essays."

"What do I live on? What do I like to eat?"

"Sheep's milk mozzarella on whole wheat oat bread with honey mustard," I told him. He made an odd sound, a cross between a grunt and a chuckle, and looked at his half-eaten mozzarella sandwich. I never saw him eat anything else for lunch, ever.

"Who are my associates, who do I like to be around?"

"Uh, Alan and Sara and some of your students," I ventured. That one was harder, since I never saw him when he wasn't working and I didn't know who he saw on his free time.

"Who don't I like to be around?" He asked this one with a sly twinkle, wondering, maybe, if I'd be able to answer, but I answered without hesitation. I knew he didn't like Kit, was more or less allergic to her. He made his chuckle-grunt again. "Is it that obvious?" he asked ruefully. "I'm going to have to do something about that." He took a few more bites of his sandwich and a pull from his water bottle.

"If you didn't know all those things about me, would you be able to say you know me?" he asked. I told him I would not. "Well, God is the same way."

I think I paled, realizing what this statement implied about how much Charlie would ask me to learn about trees, but something still didn't add up.

"But particular tree species aren't God," I objected. Charlie shrugged and held up his hand. It was big, meaty, and calloused.

"What is the name of my first finger, then?" he asked me, shrugged again, and then finished his sandwich and began to pack up. I let him go. I'd long since noticed that whenever Charlie said more than he'd expected to, he seemed to feel a need to get grumpy, or to leave afterward. Often, he didn't even say good-by. He wasn't being inconsiderate, he was being deliberately rude, showing his prickles like a porcupine would. But a porcupine is a vulnerable animal with a soft belly and a slow, impractical walk. You can kill one with a good fastball, so I've read, throw a stone that a rabbit or a cat could easily dodge. I've never actually met a porcupine up close, though I've seen them in trees once or twice. But if I did see a porcupine on the ground and it showed me its quills I would let it walk away in peace.

The Elven King

I want to tell you about summer at the school. In some ways it was simply a third semester (we never called them trimesters) in that we had classes and the same rhythm of campus life went on. There was meditation, then breakfast, when the whole campus got together over miso soup, oatmeal, sweetrolls, and eggs, then blocks of time for classes, campus work (I was still on the cleaning crew), or whatever independent projects the Masters had us working on. Lunch was informal; you could just go in to the dinning hall and get a sandwich, some soup, or a salad any time between noon and four. The bread was homemade and just amazing. We ate dinner with our dorm-mates or in various other small groups, like the Wednesday therapy groups. You could pick up food for dinner at the dining hall kitchen or prepare your own. In the evenings there was always homework, but there were also talks, workshops, parties, and sitting up with a bottle of mead late into the night, talking about everything in the world. Yes, mead; even when we did what I guess are pretty normal college-kid things, like procrastinating our homework over alcohol, we did it our own way, with mead made from the honey of our own bees. By July the previous year's hard cider was pretty much gone.

All of this was pretty much like the rest of the year. There were two big differences. First, very few semester-long courses were offered during the summer. Some years none were. Instead there were workshops, intensives, seminars, and the expectation that we would have chosen most if not all of our Masters and would be working on assignments from them. The other major difference was that the campus was full of children.

I've said how the school was run on a shoe-string, how tuition was kept incredibly low by a habit of using money as rarely as possible. But we did need some cash, and tuition didn't quite cover it. So there were a couple of cash-cow programs on campus, like occasionally renting out space for conventions and meetings and weddings and so fourth. The biggest of these projects, though, was the summer camp. We charged a thousand dollars per kid per week, which really isn't that bad--it's about normal for that sort of thing--except when you consider that the Masters themselves got only ten thousand a year (plus room, board, health insurance, and membership in a community money can't buy). The kids lived in tents out near the orchards, and students who wanted experience working with kids looked after them; they were paid in academic credit, not money.

In the mornings, the kids worked on the farm with Sara, which might possibly have violated child labor laws, but they did have fun and they learned a lot, and they got to eat some of the produce. In the afternoons they could pick among any of several activities, from archery to hiking to fishing or canoeing down at the lake two miles away. It was a fairly ordinary summer camp, and for the most part the school itself didn't mix much with them. The exception was the Dead Poet's Society.

I'm sure you've seen, or at least heard of the movie, so you probably have a basic idea of what Dead Poet's Society meetings were; groups of people meeting outdoors at night for the magic of words. In our case, the secret was no deeper than the fact that the group was by invitation only, and like everything else on campus, if you were not already involved no one would tell you anything. But it was not against the rules--it was organized by one of the Masters; my teacher, Charlie, who was a writer as well as a naturalist and a gardener.

The arrival of the campers gave Charlie the opportunity to engage in the kind of fun the real secrecy  of breaking rules provides, for while the group still wasn't against any rules, the campers did not know that. His grandnieces  and -nephews functioned as his operatives in this, for they attended the camp every year for the entire six weeks and were in on the joke. They would lead other children in sneaking out after bed-time and making their way out to to the meeting, wherever it was, lit usually by citronella torches or candles, to share poetry with mysterious grown-ups dressed in hooded cloaks. You weren't allowed to attend in the summer if you worked with the kids during the day--the illusion of transgression had to be perfect. Sometimes a camper would object to the sneaking out and tell on the young poets, so there would have to be a big show of them getting in trouble. The miscreants would be called out, lectured to, and then sentenced to spend their free time helping Charlie in the garden, a punishment calculated to be no punishment at all.

I was a member of the Society, so I got to be one of the mysterious hooded men in the torchlight. It was an absolute blast--but the kids didn't always think so. It wasn't really a children's event--the poetry was often long, difficult, or even frightening, and we didn't do much interpretation of it for them. We were not camp counselors, we were grown-ups, doing grown-up things, to which the children were invited as a special privilege. Some of them were as young as six. Most of them never came back, but maybe one in ten did. Some kids came to Society meetings every year for all eight years and Charlie got to watch them grow up. He said, of them, that they would bear watching. They were like the children in Irish folk-tales who spend time in fairy hills, or who fall asleep with their ears to the ground, listening to fairy music. The question with such children was always whether they became different because of fairy magic, or were they different to begin with, and fairy magic gave them what they needed to have a full life? Charlie wouldn't speculate, but he was, to the campers, the Elven King.

Most of them never even knew his name.

Joy

It occurs to me I've been remiss. I told you about Charlie and Alan and Kit and Greg, but then I got distracted by topics other than introductions, and lately I've been avoiding talking about Joy and Karen because you don't know who you are...and of course your won't, if I don't tell you about them.

Joy was primarily our Healing master, just as Kit had Art, Charlie had Craft, and so on. Officially Joy's healing modality was (and is) veterinary medicine, though she does not teach anyone how to be a vet. Instead, she would help people already trained as vets work with their patients and cope psychologically with dealing with the sick. She did the same for people trained in other forms of medicine, or even psychology. She helped people who had learned medicine become healers. She was also the campus vet--remember, we had chickens and sheep and cats and dogs and horses and sometimes other species....

Unofficially, Joy's healing ability went much farther. She was (and is) a real, honest-to-goodness horse whisperer. She helped deal with behavioral problems for private clients, and even worked with neglected or abused animals for rescue organizations. Her own horses were rescues, whom she has trained to pull farm equipment. She has also trained them as therapy animals, and has a whole practice giving riding lessons to disabled, traumatized, or autistic children and adults. She does not bill herself as a therapist, only as a riding teacher--she gets referrals from therapists and physical therapists. But I've seen some of these people, spoken with some of them...new paraplegics who think their lives are basically over, children who don't think they can do anything right, she takes these people and gently gives them meaning in the shape of a horse. Not always, but often, their lives turn around.

I was never one of Joy's students, nor have I ever really been her friend. I don't think I'll get around to telling very many stories about her--I don't know very many. I used to see her riding around campus, usually bareback. I found one of the cats once, obviously sick, curled up at the back of an equipment shed. I went to get Joy, and her face as she handled the cat was gentle, dispassionate, and utterly focused. The cat let her handle it, though it had hissed at me. I saw her help Sara kill a batch of chickens once, and her face looked the same--gentile, dispassionate. She called her horses wounded healers, and said trauma can be a great gift, because it means you can be a healer for others. I asked her once why anybody gets injured, if the reason we get injured is so we can heal others? It seemed circular.

"Go talk to Alan if you want logic," she told me. "But when I see a nineteen year old boy with a crushed spine who never did anything wrong, I don't look for the universe to have reason. I look for it to have meaning."

I'll tell you about Karen later.

Litha

Well, happy Litha! The summer solstice—there were some things I wanted to touch on first, but, as usual, life has gotten in the way of my plans. I’ll get to the other things later; I want to talk about the solstice on the right day.

I know people who consider the summer solstice to be a relatively minor pagan holiday, but as I’ve said, the school as a whole didn’t belong to any particular religion. For us, Litha was a really big deal, not least because friends and family were invited to the feast—I think most of the food came from off-campus. There was no way we could feed everybody from our campus farm, and I believe guests were supposed to pitch in some money. June is too early in our area for sweet corn, but there was a pig roast, grilled vegetables, greens, vegetarian chili, mountains of strawberries, and what proved to be the last of the season’s rhubarb. In the evening there was a Burning Man ceremony, in which a wicker and brush figure was sent off to the spirit world stuffed with wishes and prayers written on little pieces of paper. And that night we held the Long Dance. 

Strictly speaking, the Long Dance is a fictional invention of Ursula K. LeGuine’s, but a lot of people at the school were fans of her novels, and we made it real. The basic idea was to keep a dance going from sundown to dawn. You didn’t have to dance the whole time, or even at all, but somebody was always dancing throughout that short night. I forget if I’ve mentioned that Kit is a musician? That’s actually the core of her job, even though a lot of people go to her for magic or spiritual development. She’s the primary art teacher, and her art is music and dance. Her primary instrument is the cello, but she’s one of those people who can figure out how to play pretty much anything in about fifteen minutes, and as a result there are a lot of musicians on campus. There were more than enough bands and drum circles and whatever else to keep the music going all night, mostly around the bonfire that was left after the Man burnt down. And at the edge of the fire circle, just outside of the dancing, fireflies rose out of the long grass of the school’s pastures like shards of summer sunlight.

My family didn’t come that first year, so I was free to spend the day meeting other people’s families. Since I haven’t told you about any of my fellow students, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to tell you about their families, but a lot of the Masters’ families were there, too. That was interesting; the faculty and staff kept so much to themselves except when they were working, that the newer students knew virtually nothing about them except what they taught and how they taught it. I had not known, for example, that Kit was married, but here was a tall, bearded man she introduced as her husband. Apparently, he lived in town and she joined him on weekends.

There were other surprises. Joe and Joe had a grown son who clearly looked like both of them. Security Joe turned out to be a female to male transsexual who had transitioned some years after his son was born. I wasn’t really surprised by this—not that there was anything feminine about Joe, but he really was such a little guy, physically. His hands, in particular, were tiny, like a child’s or a woman’s. No, the surprise was that the Joes had evidently had this whole life as a family outside of the school, something I’d never thought about before. It turned out they’d once owned a house where they’d raised their son. Why give up a house and a life in the real world to squeeze together into a single eight by eight room? 

“There isn’t a lot I wouldn’t give up to live in a community that recognizes I’m still married” explained Coffee Joe when I asked him. I hadn’t thought about that, either. Remember, this was 2000, and unless you were personally involved in the issue, gay marriage wasn’t even on the radar yet. I was such a naïve, self-involved kid.

I had known Alan was married, since I’d bumped into the couple once at a UU church in town. I knew he biked home on Friday, and that his wife was also a psychologist, but I had assumed that either he did not have children or didn’t involve himself much with them. How could he? Well, the magician found a way. It turned out he had three children, a boy and a girl on either side of 11, and an angel-headed little three year old named Alexis whom he now carried about campus with such a look of besotted pride on his face I wished I could have been her, just for a few minutes. Not like my Dad isn’t proud of me, you understand. 

Charlie had no children of his own, but he had a brother, a sister, and a whole flock of nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews. The sister was a somewhat rounded matron of boundless energy and a frazzle of hair like grey yarn. I liked her immediately, though I had a hard time thinking of this wonderful grandmother as anyone’s little sister. I still kind of thought of my parents’ generation as “the grown-ups,” and I knew Charlie was a grown-up, but he was also beginning to be kind of a friend, and it startled me to be reminded how close my friend was to being old.

It startled me, too, to see how the family organized itself around him. If you’ve ever seen Rocket Gibraltar, he was like the grandfather there, the occasion for a whole tribe of young cousins to converge, even though he wasn’t the oldest of his siblings, and he had no children. I asked his sister about this, and she sighed.

“He’s always been the center of us,” she said. ”I used to resent it, but what can you do? When I was little, it was because he’s so smart—I’m sure you’ve noticed that. Then for a long time he got the attention because we were all scared to death he was going to kill himself, one way or another. He was…sick for a long time. Now, I guess we’re all just used to focusing on him—and he’s got the best place for the kids to come together and play. He’ll get all of them except Tessa’s baby for the next two weeks.”

It wasn’t just Charlie’s family who dropped their kids off, evidently; all the kids at the feast seemed to know each other already, and they ran about in groups in some world of their own. That the school community was a lot bigger than just us current students, and that it was multigenerational had not occurred to me, either, but as the long afternoon wound on, I saw that the adults gradually stopped caring which kid belonged to which parent. Anybody with a green ring would comfort, help, or holler at whichever kid needed it at the time. They were a single, big family.

As the sun started to go down I found myself watching the golden sunlight slowly retreat up the spires of the spruces and pines. There goes the longest day of the year! I thought. And then suddenly, I had to go chase the light, I couldn’t let it go without a fight. I ran off to the biggest tree on campus, an old white pine and scrambled up. White pines are easy to climb, if they’ve got branches near the ground, which this one did. The branches come out in regular whirls so it’s almost like climbing a ladder. Within a minute or so I was back in the sunlight maybe forty feet above the ground, and I stopped to breathe a bit. The branch I was sitting on swayed, and I looked up to see if the tree was moving in the wind. I didn’t want to get blown out.

“You’ve got excellent instincts,” said a voice in my ear, “but your situational awareness blows chunks.”

“Jesus Christ!” I shrieked, and Charlie laughed. He was squatting behind me, barefoot, like a monkey.  I followed him up higher into the tree until the shrinking branches left us exposed to the warm, evening breeze, the main trunk began to sway under our weight, and we could see out over the roof of even the Mansion.

“We can see everything from up here!” I cried.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Charlie offered. “This is half the reason I know so much of what goes on. You people don’t look up.”

“Wow, I’m glad I don’t have a girlfriend on campus.”

“So am I,” Charlie agreed. “Some things, a man shouldn’t see.”

We watched the sunset up there over the valley, all orange and purple with weird shadows cast upwards from one layer of shifting cloud to the next, and I was trying to figure out how to paint something like that when I noticed Charlie’s breathing had gone funny. There wasn’t a lot of room up there, so we were almost touching, and he had a bit of a cold. Suddenly, his breathing went irregular, so I looked at him, concerned. He didn’t appear to notice me. He was staring out at the sun, just dipping down beyond the far range of hills, and moving his lips. He was singing, he just didn’t want me to be able to hear him doing it.

But I’d heard his whistling several times, and I already knew the Charlie always serenaded the close of day in one way or another, though I didn’t think he knew I knew. My awareness isn’t that bad. I pretended I hadn’t noticed him singing, but then when he stopped I, quietly but audibly, began my own.

When the sun in the morning peaks over the hill

And kisses the roses on my window sill,

Charlie stared at me in shock, but I ignored him and kept singing. He joined in on the second verse.

When it’s late in the evening, and I climb the hill

And survey all my kingdom while everything’s still

Only me and the sky and an old whippoorwill

Singing songs in the twilight on Mockingbird Hill.

“Where did you learn that song?” he asked me, when we were done.

“My Dad taught me,” I told him. He chuckled.

“I’ve taught my nephews,” he told me. I expected, almost hoped, some new revelation would follow, as Charlie seemed more relaxed and unguarded than I’d ever seen him before, but he remained silent. Below us, the wicker and brush Man caught flame and the first of the bands started up, but it sounded very far away. Together, my teacher and I watched the color gradually drain from the sky leaving  glimpses of clear, midnight blue behind grey, ghostly clouds. The stars began coming out, but mostly they were covered by cloud.

Finally, I realized my foot had fallen asleep—and that I could hardly see my feet, let alone anything beneath them.

“Uh, Charlie?” I asked, “will you tell me another secret?”

“Probably, yes,” he answered.

“How do we climb down in the dark?”

Island

Twelve years ago today, I think I was doing the same thing I'm doing now; siting in my room, listening to it rain, and writing. Then, of course, I was in my room on campus, ten feet square, just a futon, a desk, a wardrobe, and some storage chests. You don't need much when you wear a uniform most of the time. I kind of miss the monkishness of it, though my wife would object if I tried to live that way now. But I don't remember anything particular happening in those weeks around the beginning of June. I'm even guessing about the rain, though it must have done that sometimes; we had decent crops that year, I do remember that. School had fallen into a rhythm, and I really don't remember a lot of details. I'll tell you more about the rhythms of the summer semester later, but I figure I should tell you about the May Trip first. That, I do remember well.

The May Trip was one of the few things yearlings could do that were optional--though I can't think why anyone would not want to go. I won't tell you where we went, except that it was an island with mountains. The trip was ten days long, plus travel days, so each of the faculty (except Greg, who didn't go) would take us for two days. The other eight days I suppose they were off on vacation--they didn't camp with us. I don't know where they stayed.

I could tell you what all we did that week--I took pretty detailed notes, and everybody but Charlie can fill in any details I might have forgotten, but I don't think I've got the space. So I'm just going to tell you about two of those days. I pick the days when Alan had us, because they were probably the most fun. The others taught us things, led workshops as they might have done on campus, except adapted to the island in some way. Alan just turned up one morning in swim trunks and asked if we all knew how to swim.

Alan in swim trunks was a bit odd, by the way--not that he looked funny or anything like that, he was in pretty good shape for a guy in his forties. It's just that I'm not sure I'd ever seen him wearing anything but a school uniform or a shirt and tie. There was always something formal, or even slightly awkward about him.

Anyway, he took us down to a little beach in an out-of-the-way cove, lead us out along the rocks along the edge of the cove, and into the water. We had to jump, because of the way the rocks dropped straight down--it wasn't a big jump, but there was no way to let yourself into the water gradually. Alan jumped first, then bobbed up to the surface, whooping because of the cold. The cold had me worried--the day wasn't exactly hot--but I jumped in next. You can only do two things in water that cold, complain or laugh, and I chose the latter.

"That's some therapy right there," Alan told me, treading water merrily almost beside me.

"Oh?" I think my teeth were chattering already "what does cold water cure?"

"Grumps, moods, blues, and sticks-up-the-ass," he replied. Once everyone was in the water, he told us to play as long as we liked without getting too cold, and that there were towels on the beach.

And that was it. There was no formal teaching, just play. For the next four or five hours we  all simply reverted to childhood. Women in their thirties pretended to be mermaids and dolphins, men raced each other down the beach with towels tied, cape-style--around their necks, and one man painted his face with mud and declaimed heroic poetry to nobody in particular from the top of a small, round rock. Even Alan became a boy again. He wore swim goggles and dove for shells and pretty rocks until his lips were blue. Then he sat happily by himself for an hour sorting his treasures into piles on his beach towel. When he was done he threw them all back into the sea, one by one. For myself, when I was done swimming, I went and sat by myself and watched everybody. That's what I did when I was little, and I suppose that's why I'm a writer now.

And then Alan grew up again and called us all together. He had a big, old-fashioned trunk, and out of it he pulled the most extraordinary collection of things. There was a small grill, a large aluminum pot, a bag of charcoal, a dozen live lobsters, bags of clams and oysters, various fruits and vegetables for grilling, jugs of water, bottles of hard cider and local beer, two Tiki torches, sleeping bags and pads for all of us, a small card table...I think he did it by using an abnormally large trunk and hiding it partway in a hole in the sand. So we had a feast, and while we feasted, Alan entertained us.

Now, obviously the masters were all masters at something, and usually more than one thing, otherwise they wouldn't have been teaching at the school--they wouldn't have worn the green ring. We knew that, but we hardly ever got to actually see them really at their best, because the focus was always on what the students could do, or needed help with. I'd known Alan was a magician the whole time I'd known him, and I knew he constantly used slight-of-hand or other small illusions to make his points, or even just to joke around. But I'd never seen him do a whole show before.

He was fantastic.

He had changed into his performance clothes, a tuxedo with a top hat, though nobody knew how or where he had changed. He did card tricks, made handkerchiefs change color, and then disappear, made small objects levitate, juggled objects whose number and type varied as we watched although none of us could catch him dropping anything or picking anything up, and the whole time kept up this marvelous chatter that made us about puke from laughing so hard. Nothing he did seemed that complicated, though I couldn't figure out how he did any of it (he still won't explain the levitating pennies), but it was the chatter, the schtick, the showmanship, that made it amazing. The only time he actually stopped talking was a brief period during which he was juggling knives--Alan was and is a master magician, but he was not quite a master juggler, and it required all of his attention. Eventually he switched out the knives for what looked like Ping Pong balls, until the balls hatched as he tossed them, one by one, high in the air, became tiny yellow helicopters, and flew away.

He stopped for a while to eat and drink with us, and then help clean up. We played some more, and then someone talked Alan into performing again. As it got dark, he snapped his fingers and pointed at the torches and both lit themselves. He pulled marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, even skewers, out of his hat and passed them around (the grill was still going). Out of the trunk came a guitar, an instrument Alan played but badly, and was glad to turn over to the musicians of the group. Most of us gradually got drunk. Someone pointed out that camping wasn't allowed on the beach, but Alan grinned, his face looking weird in the light from the torches, and told us we didn't have to worry about getting caught when camping with a magician.

In the morning, after zazen (yes, we still had to sit), the magical trunk turned out to have all the fixings for an extraordinary breakfast--omelets, oatmeal, coffee, sweet rolls, fresh doughnuts...there was even a copy of the New York Times dated from that morning. How had it gotten there? After breakfast and cleanup, Alan gave us the rest of the day off and promptly vanished. I expect he spent the rest of the day sleeping--the whole adventure must have taken an extraordinary amount of planning.

I asked him later why, when all the others used their time to do something obviously academic, did he decide to lead us in play?

"Because I thought you needed it," was his only reply.

The Boogeyman Cometh

So, as I think I mentioned to you, we had our classes, but we also had to work with masters of our choice in six competency areas; athletics, art, craft, magic, spiritual growth, and healing. Sometimes that meant they tutored us, sometimes they just told us which classes to take. Even though each of them had a particular teaching area, they also took students in several other areas, and some people worked with the same person for all six areas.

Charlie was officially the craft teacher; he taught both ecological horticulture and chainsaw operation and maintenance as crafts. I knew a few students who had talked him into teaching horticulture as an art instead, that sort of thing, and there were also rumors that he taught spiritual development—but whenever anyone asked about his spiritual practice he growled and nobody could get a word out of him about it.  But I’d noticed that persistence went a long way with Charlie. And we got along. And I’d seen his library.

So, one day I just asked him if he would teach me. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about and tried to walk away, but I followed him, so he told me he didn’t know anything I couldn’t learn on my own and to stop bothering him. Then he walked away faster.  But I’d deliberately asked him when no one else was around, which freed me to make the next argument in my case.

“I want what you have, and I’m willing to go to any lengths to get it,” I said to his receding back. It’s a slight paraphrase from the AA Big Book, and it stopped him, but he didn’t turn around. “Hey Lao Tsu,” I added, “what, are you trying to make me ask you three times?” I’d heard somewhere that Lao Tsu wrote the Tao Te Ching only after someone had asked him for his wisdom three times. I don’t know if it’s true, but I added a third request of my own, just in case. “I dare you to teach a young numbskull like me!” And Charlie turned around and came back to me.

“Alright,” he growled, “but let’s get this thing clear. I’m not your buddy, and I’m not your cheerleader. I’m the bastard that’s gonna make you do the things you don’t have the balls to make yourself do. I’ll meet you tomorrow at the Martin House twenty minutes before dawn.” And he spun on his heel and walked away. I let him go. For a man who ostensibly hadn’t wanted to teach me to begin with, it took him a surprisingly few number of seconds to come up with a lesson plan.

It took me a few hours to find out exactly when dawn would be for our area, and to find out what the Martin House was and where it was. It turned out to be a bird house; a martin is a kind of bird. But that night I set my alarm, and there I was the next morning, twenty minutes before dawn.

Charlie was nowhere in evidence. I sighed, repressed the urge to smile, and looked deliberately up at the Martin House until I felt him put his hand on my shoulder. I knew what he was doing, but I still startled a bit, which must have pleased him. He was dressed for the dawn chill and carried two squares of black foam for us to sit on. I asked him what we were going to be doing, and he told me were going to listen to birds.

“But I don’t know anything about birds!” I protested. "I'm not a birder!" He gave me the look such an inane comment deserved (I mean really, complaining to the teacher that you don’t already know the material?) before explaining.

“Neither am I. We’re going to listen to birds to see if we can’t grow you some ears.”

“Wait,” I told him, “yesterday you said I don’t have balls, now apparently I don’t have ears? Any other parts of my anatomy you care to deny?” Charlie just laughed.

“Don’t take it so hard,” he said. “Everybody needs a boogeyman.” He wasn't growling, though. There still wasn't enough light for me to see his face clearly, and if Charlie carried a flashlight it was still in his pocket, but he seemed looser, more relaxed than I'd ever seen him. He seemed happy.

What Charlie meant by growing me some ears was teaching me to differentiate bird sounds—not to identify them, just to know that this sound is different from that sound. It’s a lot harder than you’d think. He set me to counting species by sound in five minute intervals, and he wouldn’t let me leave until I could match his count for three consecutive blocks of time. We went through the same process every morning for a few weeks, and then again a few times after the spies he sent out caught me not paying attention to the sounds I heard. I bet normal professors don't send out spies. By mid summer, listening carefully was an established habit, and the whole auditory world came alive for me. 

But he was right; I wouldn't have done it without him to blame for my early mornings. And who was his boogeyman? I suppose I must have been. After all, I "made" him teach me.

Personal Things

I keep referring to Charlie as my teacher, but I haven’t told you how he got that way yet or what he taught me. Before I get to that, though, I should tell you a little bit about being a janitor. I’m serious; hopefully why this is relevant will be clear later.

As I mentioned, my job on campus was on the cleaning crew. The dorms and classrooms were cleaned by the people who used them, and the Dining Hall was cleaned by its own staff, so we just cleaned common areas, plus the areas where the staff and faculty lived. That last was a tremendous opportunity for the curious, since students were not otherwise allowed on the master’s floor, even by invitation. They made themselves so available to us most of the time that they needed some place of their own to hide. The school being what it was, where and how they lived was a secret. Only the cleaning crew knew.

The masters lived on the fourth floor of the Mansion. They didn’t all live there—some had houses in town, and Sara and her family usually stayed in the loft in the barn—but each of them had a room to go to, plus a couple of common rooms. There wasn’t much space, considering that fourteen people had less than four thousand square feet among them, but what they had was uncommonly nice. All the furniture was hand-made, the floors were some kind of honey-colored wood and mostly covered with hand-woven rush mats or rugs, and they had a library of the most fantastic books. Their dining room faced the dawning sun with floor to ceiling windows, and they could clear away the tables and use the space for yoga or dance whenever they wanted to. Every room had a balcony, and since the fourth floor was smaller than the third, they could step out of a door to a kind of rooftop garden. In the summers they grew tomatoes and basil out there, among other delights.

Mostly, we only cleaned their common rooms and the bathrooms and swept the hallway. We’d do whatever dishes they left for us, and if a light was out or a faucet dripped we’d pass the word on to maintenance. The private rooms were kept closed. But I remember, one time in late April they asked for a spring cleaning and left their rooms open. I got assigned the job, so there I was, wandering around the masters’ rooms by myself.

None of them were labeled—there were no name-plates. I knew the faculty had the rooms along the south wall, while the staff had the rooms on the east, but otherwise it was a guessing game. Some used their rooms simply as offices, while others looked lived in. Some were obviously normally a mess, given the haphazard way things had been shoved into boxes and under blankets, while others were clearly always neat as a pin. Some rooms were obvious; Sadie, the head cook, lived with her eleven-year-old daughter, Kayla, so the room with child’s things in it was obviously theirs. Joe, an intense but little man who headed the security group, lived with his husband, who was also named Joe, so again the room obviously shared by two men was theirs. The second Joe had nothing else to do with the school, though he came to breakfast sometimes, plus some of the community events. We called him Cuppa Joe, to distinguish him from Security Joe. Then there was my boss, the head janitor, who was just Joe. Two students were also named Joe, plus one named Josephine, and another named Joanne. I have no idea why the school attracted so many people named Joe or Jo. There were two Charlies, too, though the other one usually went by Chuck, and almost half the women of my year called themselves Raven. You can’t make this stuff up.

ANYWAY,

Finally I found myself in a well-kept room with a futon folded into a couch, a desk with clean spots in the dust where personal items had been removed prior to my arrival, a few shelves and trunks of clothes and papers, and yet another bookcase. I looked over the books. One shelf was entirely dedicated to some serious scientific books, mostly on ecology, but there were two very serious-looking botany texts, another on mushrooms, and another on beetles. Another shelf was dedicated to field guides—trees, shrubs, birds, scat, bird’s nests, tracks, wild flowers, and so on. Then there was a shelf half full of books on writing, with the rest of the space taken up by horticulture and popular-market books on wildlife-friendly landscaping. By his books, I recognized Charlie.

Obviously, he had organized his books by topic, but the top two shelves seemed to be rather mixed. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek sat next to Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Two translations of the Bible kept company with Sand Country Almanac, Desert Solitaire, and Honey From Stone. Two books by Rainer Maria Rilke stood next to The Bhaghevad Gita and the Tao Te Ching.  I saw books by Gary Snyder, Gary Paul Nabhan, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Tom Robbins rubbed shoulders with Tom Wessels, whose book was the only one of the lot not smudged, cracked, and dog-eared. Evidently, the book was new. I thought at first that these shelves were for books that didn’t belong on the other shelves, a kind of catch-all, but something about the collection kept tugging at me. “It dawned on me” is a cliché, but try to imagine you’ve never heard it before. Try to remember the dawn, how slowly the light and color come up so you can never quite be sure when night ends and the day begins until suddenly you see the sun and the day is clearly here. That’s how I realized that these two shelves were dedicated to Charlie’s understanding of Spirit.

I looked slowly about the room I was supposed to be dusting. I saw birds’ nests and pine cones, dried flowers and smooth stones. I saw a photograph, framed in silver, of a small dog, but no human images. I saw rugs, knick-knacks, a walking stick, items made and given by a lifetime of students. I saw both pairs of Charlie’s shoes, the work boots and the sandals, meaning that wherever he was at the moment, he was barefoot. I saw the hammock swung on the balcony where Charlie slept when the weather cooperated.

And on the desk, I saw a tin whistle.