Mastery Year 3: Sixth Interlude

Hello, Daniel-of-2019, here.

It's been a warm, mostly dry fall--climate change becoming ever more obvious, more ominous--except the day-to-day realities of our lives here are going well. After months of relapse and hit-or-miss treatment, Sarah Kelly's mental health seems that have stabilized again, a great relief. It's as though everyone can finally breathe again. We've also gotten some very good news that I'm not going to tell you about quite yet, but I will tell you.

My story is drawing to a close; we've entered the realm of Lasts, last Samhain post, last Yule post, and so on. I will take my narrative up to the point where I received my green ring, and then there will be a few more posts to catch you up on some of the things that have happened since. Then I will fall silent--except that I may set about recasting my story in book form.

I'm kind of sad--I've been working on this blog for the better part of a decade, now, and it's been an important decade for me. My daughter's birth, for one. The re-emergence of the school as a community, for another. But all things end.

All things end. That is the message of Samhain, I suppose, for while endings are followed by, and to some extent cause or allow, beginnings, there is a point in time where the bereft doesn't want to hear that, where hope and comfort and it's-all-for-the-best just sound like meaningless platitudes. My Dad would say Good Friday must have its due, before you can get to Easter. Charlie would say be here now.

I'm going to keep this note short. I'm preoccupied with endings and losses today, and yet I'm overwhelmed by the beauty of autumn, which has finally peaked this past week. "We are the flowers' threnody," a line of poetry I remember from somewhere, based on the mistaken notion that flowers die upon being visited by bees (the truth is more complicated), and evoking the idea that the bees are simultaneously the cause of and the beautiful mourning for the death of the flowers, as though beauty could in fact be both. The yellow and orange leaves are the year's threnody.

Be here now.

-best, D.

Mastery Year 2: Litha

Happy Litha!

Lately it’s been seeming like my favorite holiday is whichever one we’re having at the time you ask. Each has its own things to like. What I like best about Litha is the giant picnic of it, seeing faculty and students in the context of their families—this whole extra part of the school community we hardly ever see otherwise.

Mine came over, of course, and here I mean my brother and his wife and children, not my parents or sister. Their kids, Paul, Ruthie, and Chris (can you tell we’re Christian?) are full-on sprouts, now, six, five, and three years old, respectively, so almost as soon as they arrived they all vanished into some world of the sprouts’ creation, and we didn’t get more than a glimpse of them for the rest of the evening.

“I remember when mine were like that,” commented Allen, nostalgically.

“One of yours still is,” I reminded him, since Alexis is 11 and still a sprout in good standing.

“I pluralized my nostalgia,” he reminded me, a little sternly. Allen is always very precise with his language. Then he smiled a little and I laughed.

We picnicked with Allen and Lo, as usual, since they seem to have adopted me, and Ebony, whose mother I have still never met. Apparently, she and Allen have largely repaired their relationship—I still sense a kind of mutual cautiousness that I never noticed before, but also a kind of deliberateness, as though they are building something together. Today, she actually laid her head on his thigh, an extraordinary gesture of affection which made Allen visibly uncomfortable for a few seconds, since that is not normally any way to treat one’s professor. I think she was trying things, to see what would happen, and what happened was that after a few seconds, Allen seemed to make up is mind to go with it. He relaxed a little and, cautiously at first, then with a more absent-minded air, stroked her hair.

The day was incredibly hot, and the Central Field where we picnicked had filled with bees, attracted both to the clover and dandelions in the grass and to the foods and drinks and desserts scattered among the picnic blankets of well over a hundred families. After we ate, my brother John and I left June and the others and took a walk, largely to be social. We dipped in and out of conversations, exchanged benign gossip, and I introduced John to some of the people he hadn’t known, yet. A lot of them knew him only as “Paul and Ruthie’s father,” which surprised him but not me.

Apple Blossom, a yearling, wanted to know why it’s called “Litha,” not “Solstice,” and Aimee, who is also a yearling and was sharing her picnic blanket, asked “well, then, why Apple Blossom?” in tones suggesting that names are just weird around here and ought not to be questioned.

“Because I’m pretty and sweet,” explained Apple Blossom. “Everything does have a reason.”

But I didn’t know the reason for “Litha,” and neither did John, though he wondered aloud if perhaps it had to do with the river, Leith, in Ireland. We moved on.

John spent a while talking about alchemy with Acorn and then debating—yes, debating—religion with Samara and Edna, and then Aaron, the librarian, whose picnic spot was nearby, snagged our attention by remarking that John and I do look so much alike. Half a dozen people were clustered around Aaron, most of whom I’d never seen before—his family, I suppose, though I’d never thought of him as having a family, apart from us, but there they were. Aaron explained that they lived in Florida and rarely got to visit. One picnicker I did recognize—Ahab, Aaron’s pet scarlet macaw. He wore a long leash, tied to his right ankle (his wings are not clipped) but otherwise seemed able to do what he wanted, and was busy demolishing a big pile of strawberries.

“I know you are, but what am I?” he said, clearly, when he saw me looking at him. Aaron laughed.

Mason and Jay, two more yearlings, neither of whom had invited family (like me my first year, they had not realized family could be invited) had camped out with Aaron and his family, possibly because Jay is Aaron’s student.

“What do you think of this place?” John asked them.

“It’s cool,” asserted Mason. With the non-committal vaguary I’d expect of a teenager.

“Weird as hell, but I like it,” said Jay, with enthusiam.

“How weird is Hell?” asked Aaron, and Jay, laughing, told him to shut up. Which is not how you treat your professor, either, but Aaron, nonplussed at first, shrugged and seemed to go with it.

We moved on.

At Charlie’s complex of blankets, I found the expected complex of relatives and in-laws. Charlie himself was deep in conversation with his sister, Mary, when we walked up and looked at me, briefly but did not speak. Mary’s son, Justice, and her daughter, June were there (Obviously a different June than my wife of the same name), along with their respective spouses—Mary’s other daughter, Maggie, wasn’t, but Maggie’s kids aren’t sprouts anymore. The sprouts themselves weren’t present, but June’s 15-year-old twins were, plus the boyfriend of one of the twins, plus Paul, Charlie’s nephew through his late brother, and Paul’s grown son, Jason. All of them, except Charlie and Mary, welcomed me and John into their picnic and their conversation, which quite typically was intellectual, convoluted, and jolly.

On the Silanos’ blankets, too, sat Steve Bees and his son, Sean. They were both fairly quiet, very obviously on the fringes of things. Steve looked a little uncomfortable, but then, he often does, these days.

“He’s being adopted,” explained June, seeing me look at Steve. Steve himself smiled nervously at me.

While we’d been walking and talking, the sky had started to cloud up, and since John and I had been talking with the Silano clan, the temperature had begun to drop, just a little. Charlie looked over at me and raised his eye-brows. I cleared my throat. The others looked at me.

“It’s going to rain,” I said. “Storm, actually. We have about fifteen minutes.”

“We should tell the others,” said Mary, starting to gather her things. I don’t know whether she trusts me so implicitly, or if she knew Charlie had prompted me and therefore shared my opinion. Either way, that a person could give an accurate weather prediction simply based on the feeling of the air she clearly took for granted.

I looked around and saw a shift in the movement of the picnickers all across the field, the way you can see a shift if you approach one of those puddles of massed ants (which I’ve always been told are ant wars, but I’ve never seen the ants in the mass actually fighting) and blow on it.

“They know,” I reported. “They’re packing up.”

“Where are we going to go?” asked Mary, though she sounded unconcerned.

“Chapel Hall, I imagine,” said Charlie, with a bit of an unexplained growl. “Or the Dinning Hall. They’re the only two places big enough. We’ll see where the self-organizing process takes us.” He was referring to a characteristic of complex systems, the idea being that the whole mass of us would exhibit a kind of herd consciousness and make a collective decision without any individual leadership. And so we did. Being tall, I could watch the process, to some extent. Groups of people initially milled about in multiple directions, appearing indecisive, until a general momentum built in the direction of the Dining Hall. Once that momentum became established, even those picnickers heading towards the Chapel turned around and came to the Dining Hall.

“I would have preferred the Chapel,” grumped Charlie.

“The ants go marching one by one…” I sang, and he glanced at me and smirked.

“You know too much to be entirely polite anymore, Daniel,” he told me.

“Yes,” I agreed, “but fortunately most people don’t know enough to understand what I’m talking about.”

“Be careful,” he warned me, “I have students all over here. So do you.”

And at almost precisely 15 minutes after I’d issued my warning, it began to pour. We could hear it on the Dining Hall roof. More importantly, about five minutes after that, a huge peal of thunder let me know we’d been right to come inside. I, for one, could have a picnic in the rain, though wet food can be a bit of a drag, but I draw the line at being struck by lightning.

The storm was a big one, the first really satisfying electrical storm of the year, and afterwards, well past sunset, we all went outside again and found somebody had managed to cover the Man (an effigy of straw and various invasive exotics Charlie wants to burn) with a tarp. We un-tarped it and set it on fire without much trouble, and as distant peals of thunder moved off towards the east, we danced the sun up, as per tradition.

As I start to really take seriously my ambition of maybe spending my life here, it occurs to me that what makes this school different from other schools is not that we study magic or any of the rest of it, but simply this. That at other schools, the main point is to prepare students for life in the wider world, and any sense of community within the institution is either an educational technique or an incidental byproduct of the collective effort at education. Here, the main point is to create the community.

Mastery Year 1: Part 6: Post 1: Mabon

Happy belated Mabon.

It’s curious, we call our autumnal equinox party “Mabon,” but we never talk about who or what a mabon is. Where does the name come from? Why do we use it? Kit told a story once about a quest to find a man named Mabon, who was the only person able to kill a magical boar who needed to be killed as part of a long, multi-stage process without which one of King Arthur’s knights would have been unable to wed the woman he loved. But what that Mabon has to do with Fall, I do not know.

In any case, happy Autumn. The leaves have definitely begun to turn here, although we are still at least a week or two away from peak color, and the goldenrods and asters are in full flower in the fields—everything still has the look of fullness, of growth, although the insect song has changed radically—the cicadas are done for the year, as are some others I can’t name, all we have left in the thin, pulsing music of the crickets. They’ll go until frost.

I enjoyed the celebration. I always do. This year was a little different because for once I didn’t have to choose between the Gratitude Circle and the Thankyou Doll build, which normally happen at the same time, but this year Allen had to move the Circle up two hours because of an appointment he had with a therapy client that could not be scheduled at any other time. That put it opposite Greg’s Higan observance, which was unfortunate, because Karen normally attends the Circle and of course she helps with the Higan service. But the good news is that people who always attend the Thankyou Doll build—Charlie, Sarah, and most of the sprouts—were free to attend the Circle. Of course, Charlie didn’t come. I’d hoped he would, but Kit attends the Circle and they are still allergic to each other.

Anyway, the Gratitude Circle meets in the grassy area behind Chapel Hall, near the outdoor grill where we have Philosopher’s Stone Soup. It’s almost enclosed by the Hall on one side, the Main Greenhouse on another, and by a partial and broken ring of tall hickory trees. They’re only beginning to turn, and the place still looked very green and lush, with plenty of room in the middle for fifty or sixty people to stand in a ring, me and June included.

The way it works is that there is a big basket of balls of yarn, rejects from student spinners, and someone takes a ball, gives it to someone else, thanks them for something, and keeps the end of the yarn so that a strand of yarn connects thanker and thankee. The next person gives it to someone else, and on and on, until everyone is connected by a visible web of gratitude and yarn. Once the web starts filling in, it becomes impossible to cross the circle to give the ball of yarn away, so a child ferries it around, tying on new balls of yarn when the old ones finish. For three years Alexis had that honor, but I’ve heard that two years ago she gave it to Aidan, since she was getting too big to run under the yarn. Aidan is still little, but this year he decided he didn’t want to attend the Circle, so he passed it on to my nephew, Paul.

I’m proud to see a family member of mine getting involved in that way.

Allen always starts the Circle, since it’s his show, and he always thanks a member of his family first, in this case, Alexis, whom he adores. She handed it back to him, to thank him for getting the pet ferrets (whom she adores and actually had with her inside her shirt), so he had to find someone else to thank. To my surprise, he picked me.

“Thank you for becoming my friend,” he said. “And for coming back. We need you.”

“It’s good to be back,” I said. I could have thanked him in return, but there was someone else I had to hand the yarn to, first. That early in the proceedings, I didn’t have to use Paul as a go-between (and Allen hadn’t). I strode across the circle to my wife.

I handed her the yarn, and I kissed her. And I mean I really kissed her. Everyone else hooted and hollered, which of course was part of the point, and when I let her come up for air she said “woa!” and everybody laughed and hooted again.

So, who did June give her yarn to? She gave it to me, of course, and kissed me. And I mean she really kissed me. Grabbed my ears for leverage and everything (scratched one of them too, by accident, but I ignored that). More hooting and hollering. So, when she let me come up for air, I gave the yarn back to her and kissed her again.

“I could get used to this!” I said, to make everybody laugh.

“Get a room!” someone shouted. More laughter.

“We can’t until February, she’s a novice!” I shouted back.

“Screw February,” June said, with feeling, “I’m getting you alone tonight!” She spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear her, and triggered more laughter.

She made as if she were going to give me the yarn again, just for effect, then pushed me away, gently, and said “tonight.” That was for laughter, too of course, but it wasn’t only for laughter—she kept her promise.

I returned to my place in the ring, carefully trailing all three strands of yarn between us, and she gave the yarn to Kit and thanked her “for introducing me to the other kind of magic.” June is learning stage magic from Allen, but recently she’s started studying Wicca with Kit.

“What, no kiss?” asked Kit, and everyone laughed, and June kissed her on the cheek. “Oo, I can see why he likes you!” she said, afterwards, as though that chaste peck had been something else, and the laughter kept going, while June giggled, embarrassed, into the back of her wrist. From then on, though, Paul had to take up his duty as Yarn Ferry (Yarn Fairy?) and kissing did not become a theme of the whole Circle.

Anywhere else but here, on campus, such kissing and joking would have been out of place, especially with children present, but there is a kind of innocence to sex here. It’s an innocence very carefully maintained; Kit would never have joked about kissing me, for example, because it would not have been a joke to me, and she knows it, and her respect for that boundary is absolute.

A year ago, I don’t think June would have joked that way, not with me in public, and certainly not with a woman. She has learned that innocence. She has become of this place.

After the Gratitude Circle, we went right over to the Thankyou Doll Build, which June found utterly charming. This year, the Doll was made mostly of parsnips, with stalks of Setaria grass as hair and a couple of bright orange, pre-maturely fallen sugar maple leaves as a skirt. Two blue potatoes served as breasts, very long green beans for arms, and the thin tip of a parsnip made for a very long nose.

“Those potatoes aren’t the same size,” remarked a young yearling named Brad, as though the disparity were a comical design flaw. And indeed, we had tried to find a matching pair and done the best with what we had.

“Someone hasn’t seen enough women,” muttered Charlie, busily affixing a pair of tiny, round chilies to the face with broken toothpicks. They would be eyes. He wasn’t joking.  Charlie is celibate, but he’s not sexless, and he has no patience for straight men who maintain unrealistic ideas about women’s bodies. Nobody laughed. Brad blushed.

Later, after we had woken the Thankyou Doll (Joyce Anne did the honors, being a few months younger than my other nephew, Chris. The twins, Janus and James were both there, so technically James was the youngest one present, but the twins are late talkers), and given it the traditional tour, we sat down to the Paleolithic Feast.

Charlie sat down next to me. 

“I heard you had quite the Gratitude Circle today,” he said.

I blushed.

“I’m not criticizing,” he added, responding to my blush.

I relaxed a little.

“I heard you talked to Allen.”

He meant, I think, the conversation I had with Allen a week or so ago about my status as a student.

“Welcome back,” he said.

Mastery Year 1: Part 5: Post 2: Deep Dive

Allen organizes his day around swimming, as far as I can tell.

I don't know what he does when he's at home (I could ask Ollie, but haven't), but when he's here...at least in the summer, his hair is often wet.

He comes in by bike on Tuesday morning. He doesn't have to attend breakfast on Tuesday, because the rule is you have to go to breakfast if you spent the night before, and in the winter he often comes in only at the end, just in time to hear announcements. If he's running late, he'll still be wearing his cycling clothes, carrying his helmet. But in the summer, if Ollie and I go for a run in the morning, we'll often see him coming in when we come back to the Mansion to shower before breakfast--that's around seven. I don't know if he's trying to beat the heat of the day, or if he just likes getting up before dawn, as he must do summer and winter, to maintain that schedule.

Usually, he'll have Alexis with him, if she's not in camp. A lot of the Sprouts spend most of the summer on campus, whether they're in camp or not (Charlie used to have a pile. This year he has only Julius, because Janus and James are still toddlers and the others aged out of Sproutdom). When I was a novice, Allen would come in with Julie and David behind him on their own bikes and Alexis in a carrier. Now Alexis has her own bike and follows her father alone. David is in college. Julie is working a summer job. The carrier isn't even on Allen's bike, anymore. Instead, he has pannier bags.

Anyway, at lunch, Allen disappears from campus again. I see him coming in to eat just before classes are due to start, his black hair wet, his shirt--always a professional-looking short-sleeved button-down, never a t-shirt--damp from being put on just after he got out of the lake. This year I've gone with him a few times. It's just a short bike-ride away. The cool water feels good. I splash around a bit, swim a few laps along the shore. Allen disappears. From the minute he steps in the lake, he spends as much time under water as he can, hyperventilating before he submerges so he can stay down even longer. He surfaces like a seal, to breathe, when he has to.

He stays the week on campus, but I still see him bike in before breakfast, because he goes for a swim first thing, while the air is still chilly. But he doesn't feel the cold.

Every day, it's his ritual. He even goes when it's raining. "Why wouldn't I swim when it's raining?" he asks. "I'm going to get wet, anyway." And he has a point.

I once asked him why he likes swimming so much.

"Why does anybody like anything?" he answered, and I waited for him to give me a real answer. We were eating lunch, just after he'd gotten back. He does look happier, more energized and more relaxed, after he has come from the water. "I feel calmer under there," he said. "I feel at home."

"Water is the emotional element," said Kit, who was eating with us. "You are a psychologist."

"I'm not sure I feel at home in emotions, though," he said. "That's why I'm a psychologist."

"Nobody is totally at home in water," she replied. "We can't breathe in it. To stay fully immersed, we have to bring some air down with us." Metaphysically, as you may know, water is associated with emotions, air with the intellect.

"Intellectually, I agree with you," said Allen. "I am a psychologist--I study emotions intellectually. I have snorkled and SCUBA-dived, and I like both. But what I like best is going down, just me, and exhaling to make myself less buoyant, and just exist down there, wholly of the water, not breathing. I like to get away from air, when I can."

Mastery Year 1: Part 4: Litha

Happy Litha.

Once again the campus has been happily over-run with friends and family and sprouts--more of that latter group than I expected. Families have expanded and changed since the last time I celebrated the summer solstice here.

Everyone has grown older, this I knew, though it still somehow surprises me that Aidan is seven and not remotely a baby anymore. I mean, I remember seeing him nursing. And Charlie's brother, Mario, died a few years ago, as I'd known. But there are whole new families, too.

One new family is mine--my brother and sister-in-law are both here, and all three of their kids are sprouts--Paul, Ruthie, and Chris. As you can probably tell, my family likes Biblical names. Another belongs to the new treasurer, John (not to be confused with my brother, also John). He has a complicated family consisting of children from the wife he divorced, a child from the wife he buried, and two step-kids, mostly all grown, and starting to present him with grandchildren (who are now sprouts). Also, two more of Charlie's innumerable nephews have married, and one has sprouted twins.

My older niece and nephew are right in the middle of all of this--Paul and Ruthie are five and three, respectively, so John-the-treasurer's three grandkids fit right in--Kyle is four, and Justin and Aimee are both three, so the five of them form a developmentally similar sub-tribe and spent most of the day running around in a group.

Chris can't keep up. He's only two. But Janus and James, the twins, are eighteen months old, and he can play big brother to them.

Anyway, between visiting former students (Willa was here, of course), former faculty (Chuck and Malachi were both here, although Joe S., my old boss, was not), spouses, sprouts, former sprouts, parents, and various other hangers on, I think there must have been well over four hundred people on campus.

Good thing there was extra food.

Two pigs' worth of pork barbecued, fried, and smoked alongside kebabs of mushrooms and onions, tables practically sagged under bowls of steamed greens, salads, baked goods, cheeses, honey, and fruit, and later there were custards and pies and strawberry cake. From about 10 AM on, there was always plenty to eat and always a line up around the tables.

Not surprisingly, my Dad got in there to help with the grilling. He said it was extra-delicious because of "Kretzman magic," though, just between you and me, food here is always about equally delicious. It was good to see my Dad participating--weird that he used the word "magic." Maybe he's starting to come to terms more with what we do here.

I spent most of the day running around with Paul and Ruthie and them--kids their age are much more capable, and much smarter, and much more fun to be with than they get credit for. The day was hot, but not dangerously so. The older kids rode their bikes down to the lake to swim in the afternoon, but the littles were too little to go without an adult, so they ran around in the sprinklers we had set up to wet down the area around the Man.

The Man. This year he was an attractive purple and pale green of phragmites and loose-strife, all tied up with various vines and filled with notes written on little fluttering pieces of paper for the Man to take with him to the Spirit World when he burned.

I didn't see him light up this year. I didn't watch the sunset from up in the tree, either. Instead, I was so involved in playing hide-and-seek with the littles (I am very good and hide-and-seek, by the way. Being a naturalist helps) and totally failed to notice either until it was too late. When it got too dark for us to seek each other, we hunted lightening bugs until the various parents came to collect their children and left me to my own devices.

"Should I fetch you home to bed, too?" said my Dad, when he found me.
"Just cause I act like a kid doesn't mean I am one," I told him.
"Tomorrow, you'll be a married man."
"Yup, that I will."
"Where's June?" he asked.
"I don't know. We're supposed to be avoiding each other this week. Separation before conjunction and all that."
"Conjunction...? Are you talking magic again? or sex?"
"Same thing, I think," I said. That made him laugh.
"Is is it true we dance the sun up tonight?" Dad asked. He's never stayed the night at a Sabbat celebration before.
"Donno, Dad," I told him. "Let's find out."

And we did.

Year 4: Seventh Interlude

Hello.

I'm sitting here--in 2016--listening to Jimmy Buffet singing (on  recording, of course):

So this is Christmas
(war is over)
Another year older
A new one just begun.

War is not over, of course. Neither is climate change, or the vast specter of the threat loomed by Donald Trump. I have a hard time with Christmas sometimes--saying that Jesus is born and now everything will be great and it just isn't.


But Christmas is a good time to remind ourselves of these values and to recommit. As long as the line is not crossed into feel-good delusion, it is a positive thing.

And recommit we do. We, as a community, have made a decision to re-open the school as a school with its own campus. We don't know yet what that will look like, but it won't be the same as it was before--our original model was too vulnerable, as events showed us, so we'll have to embed the school inside some kind of larger project, to give it greater protective camouflage. It will probably take us some years to work out our plans and raise the necessary money, but we've set the process in motion--this year's returning of the light, if you will.

We've made this decision because, just as the outer world has grown to resemble our community more over the past few years, we now fear the two are getting less alike. Living out in the world as we do, it's going to get harder and harder to not be influenced by that shift--or to not be exhausted by the effort of constantly maintaining deliberate cultural dissonance. Re-creating our counter-cultural bubble gives us another option.

Not that we want to hide in the bubble. We did that before, and we've come to think that was a mistake, a shirking of responsibility. But we need a refuge, a place to recharge and to center, a place to radiate from...when you want to work (or play) outside in the winter, you need a warm refuge nearby, an assurance of safely. Otherwise, all your time and energy must be occupied with survival and you can't to the work or ply you came outside to do.

Anyway, at the moment we--June and Carly and I, and my brother and his family--are at my parents' house. Since June and I have switched our attention to Solstice, visiting our parents for the holiday has gotten simpler, since we don't have a family Christmas to compete for time and attention. If June had only been raised Jewish, holiday planning would be simpler yet (I mean because the grandparents would not be in competition over us for the same holiday). Except this year, of course, since Chanukah and Christmas coincide.

Thirteen years ago today, I was also at my parents' house. I got a ride from another student (I forget who) the day after Yule, and stayed at home for something like two or three weeks before returning to campus--we were supposed to spend most of January on campus because of vaguely described duties related to graduation.

I'm going to simply skip over those weeks in my narrative, then spend January in a series of posts that don't have much to do with the date. I explained a little about that already.

But for now, I wanted to talk a little about something Steve Bees told me when we met up again on campus after the holiday.

Steve could have gone home to Ohio for Christmas, but then he wouldn't have been able to spend much time with his girlfriend over her college break. So instead, he stayed on campus except for Christmas itself, when he went to Charlie's sister's house, with Charlie.

When he told me about going there for Thanksgiving, I didn't think to ask a lot of questions. This time, I asked whether Charlie was any different when he wasn't on campus--but I couldn't get Steve to understand what I meant. Eventually, I tried asking what the holiday was like and he told me the story and so I finally extracted the information I wanted.

Charlie and Steve arrived n hour or so before dinner on Christmas Eve and all his grand-nieces and -nephews reacted as though Santa Clause had just shown up. Charlie did bring presents, but they also wanted his company and competed for his attention. Throughout the evening the other adults (sister, Maria, her husband, brother, Mario, and various grown nieces and nephews) all treated Charlie as the guest of honor--and he responded. And he wasn't grumpy or growly at all. He was relaxed, good-natured, and slightly self-centered, accepting the attention as though it were his due and happily lecturing everybody on whatever topics came into his head. I remember his sister once told told me "he's always been the center of us," and from Steve's description, he still was.

In contrast, Charlie's brother, Mario, hardly spoke. He wasn't unfriendly, Steve said, just quiet. The only time he spoke that Steve could really think of was when Charlie and his sister were speaking Italian in order to not be understood by the kids and one of Maria's grown daughters said "that's not not going to work for much longer, Mom, the kids are learning Italian in school." Mario spoke up to say he didn't understand why the whole family stayed so fixated on Italian.

"They're American," he said. "Italian won't get you anywhere. Americans should learn Spanish or French. Or, these days, Farsi or something." Mario is the only one who retains an Italian accent and who remembers even a few words of their fathers' dialect. He doesn't speak Italian otherwise. Charlie and Maria are fluent in the Italian they learned in school, which was not the same dialect.

Charlie replied, in Spanish, something like "where can I go with my Spanish but not my Italian? There are Italians in Mexico and Spain, yes?"

(Steve told me the English translation he extracted from Maria later. I'm guessing it was something like donde puedo ir con mi Espanol pero no mi Italia? Hay Italianos in Mexico y Espania, si? But that's my high school Spanish guessing.)

Mario replied, in his high school Spanish, "Yes, but the Italians who emigrate to Mexico and Spain learn the language of their new country."

And one of the grand-nieces giggled, clearly understanding the somewhat playful exchange, and Charlie turned to his sister and said "sounds like St. Nickolas is going to have to use Latin," in Latin. "Or French," Maria said, in French.

"Actually, I understand some French," said the grand-niece, in Italian.

Steve was much impressed.


The whole family, including Charlie, went to Midnight Mass, and in the morning spent approximately 426 years opening gifts, given how many people were assembled there. Then, after brunch, the kids played with their new toys and Charlie and Mario played video games with each other--recapturing their boyhoods, except of course when they were boys, video games did not exist.

Then, who should show up mid-afternoon but Allen, Lo, and their kids. They stayed for dinner and actually stayed the night--the kids all merged together into one indivisible group of cousins (related and otherwise) and Allen joined the gaming brothers for a while.

Steve hadn't known that Allen and Charlie were friends. I had known, but I didn't know they spent Christmas dinner together. Steve said they were nearly inseparable the whole evening, except when Allen tried to involve himself in making dinner. After the meal, Charlie played his tin whistle for everyone.

So, was Charlie different when he wasn't thinking about being a teacher?

In some ways he obviously wasn't. In other ways...I have a hard time imagining him playing his whistle so openly on campus, nor does he normally go on about the things he knows without being asked. From Steve's description, he sounded more relaxed, less self-conscious, and more social than I'd ever seen him. 

Year 4: Part 7: Post 1: Samhain

Happy Samhain.

The school year, my last one here, ended with something of a whimper (and a bang, non-academically speaking). My two classes simply ended with no particular ceremony or special observance, and I was done. Of course, they weren't final classes for most of the other students--they were only mine by chance. We finish our time here all in different places and in all different ways.

Finding out that I've been a straight A student has had an odd effect on my perspective on my academics. We're encouraged, here, to think about our classes only in terms of how well we mastered the material, how well we met our learning goals--there's no objective, impersonal standard to compare ourselves to, except success or failure, and no way to compare ourselves to each other. I'd almost gotten used to thinking that way, almost let go of being a high-achieving student. I mean, that was always part of my self-concept, as a kid and a teenager, I got good grades. And I'd just started to let go of that.

And now it's back.

I look around at my fellow students and wonder how many of them got A's? Do any of them know that I did? Is there any socially acceptable way to tell them? I always got good grades, but never this good. 4.0, a perfect score on everything. Surely that has to mean something important.

It means I'll have a somewhat easier time getting into grad school, and I might be able to get some scholarship money. Nothing more. To get bragging rights, you have to be among other people who are likewise bragging.

In any case, Samhain Eve this year was cold and clear and perfect. We gathered, as we do, in the Chapel and we eulogized the Beloved Dead and sang Hats Off to Dead Folks by the warm, flickering glow of beeswax candles, and it was lovely. Perfect. Normal. This is normal for me now. This is home.

During the mingling period, after the masters had come down off the stage, but before they left, Charlie came up to me, apparently eager to tell me something before he went into eclipse for the year--there's no rule against their talking to us outside of the school year, and of course there's the reception afterwards by the fire, which they share with us, but Charlie tends to like to seclude himself pretty deeply and I imagine he didn't want a To-Do item looming over him.

"Daniel," he told me, "you don't have to worry about sex. She doesn't demand monogamy."

It took me a couple of seconds to figure out what he was talking about--he didn't mean Joanna, he meant the land, the physical campus which he had described as his wife and lover.

"You can follow a path like mine, without being physically celibate as I have been."

"Thanks for telling me," I began, but at that moment the bell rang and Charlie went blank, stopped seeing me, and walked away. They all do that, at that moment, even if they're in the middle of a sentence.

I honestly hadn't stopped to think about that--it hadn't occurred to me that loving the land, as Charlie had taught me to do, might preclude my loving a woman. But then, I didn't take the possibility of being married to the land literally. I probably didn't take it as seriously as he did, either. I wanted to talk to Charlie about that, to ask if that was a problem, if I needed to go deeper. I also wanted to ask why he had thought to issue me that particular reassurance now of all times. How much did he know and how did he know it?

We all streamed out of Chapel Hall, towards the fire circle. I fell to the back of the group, distracted by my thoughts. I made myself vulnerable.

A jolt, and I fell and my fall was oddly cushioned. I settled on the ground gently, like a leaf. Tiny bodies swarmed over mine, immobilizing me by sheer weight, and a small hand pressed itself over my mouth.

"Don't fight, Mr. Daniel! You'll hurt the Littles!"

It was Gage Grimm's voice, Sarah's son and the current oldest of the Sprouts, a boy I did not know well. His voice penetrated my reflexive panic. I realized what had happened and, obedient, I stopped struggling and lay still.

As far as I can reconstruct it, two of them had pushed my legs forward, out from under me, while two more grabbed handfulls of my uniform at my hips and sides and yanked me backwards. The four oldest, all nearly adult size, caught me using the zipper lock arm arrangement they learn for elevated trust falls at summer camp. The whole thing was incredibly well coordinated, and while it was happening I was mostly disoriented and confused.

"You don't need to call him 'Mr.,' he's just a student," said one of the Ackerman-Ben twins, great-nieces of Charlie's. They're not identical, but I can't tell their voices apart, and everyone was wearing masks. It was very dark. And then it was very bright.

"Don't shine the flashlight in his face!" said an older girl, Mary Grimm, I think. The brightness went away, but any night vision I'd had was gone.

"He's almost not a student, though," interjected Billie Grimm.

 "We don't need to call any of them 'Mr.' or anything tonight," Mary Grimm continued. "It's Samhain."

"Yeah, but I don't want him to be scared," said Gage. "Or angry."

"I like him," said a small voice. Alexis! Allen's daughter. I like her, too, but didn't know whether I should speak. There was still a hand over my mouth, though it felt light and somewhat distracted now. "Mr., um, I mean, Daniel, don't be scared, we practiced all of this. A lot!"

"He knows that!" said Mary. "They're in on it, too, you know. This is all just pretend."

"Get the rope around his feet," said Gage. "Here, hand me that gag. Don't talk with this gag on, ok, Daniel?"

I nodded my assent, and a bandanna was tied loosely across my mouth. It wasn't a gag at all, of course. But the rope around my feet and legs was quite real, and the older children checked the knots to make sure they were secure. Next, they tied my hands together, then sat me up so they could wrap another rope around and around my chest, pinning my arms in front of me. Then another bandanna went across my eyes. Gage had me roll this way and that, so they could get something like a cargo net, or maybe a hammock, under me. I didn't understand that part, at first. I thought they would tie it around me, like a cocoon, but they didn't. They proceeded to do something to my hair and my shirt collar and my ropes, something that sometimes pricked, sometimes tickled, and sometimes felt quite pleasant, like a massage. They took off my shoes and socks and placed them in a pile on my belly.

Gage ran off to negotiate the ransom for me. I lay quietly and thought about life while the children speculated about what kind of loot their performance would earn. The loot would be mostly candy, of course. For the Sprouts, Trick-or-Treat leans heavily towards Trick-and-Treat.

Finally they picked me up by the cargo net (that's what it was for! Of course, the way they'd tied me I could not walk), all of them working together, and carried me over to the fire. There they received the first payment of their candy, cheered, and ran away, leaving me lying there like a caterpillar.

I was quickly unwrapped by friendly adults, who explained that I'd had chicken feathers stuck in my hair, my shirt, and my bindings. I'd looked ridiculous, as intended. My health was ascertained and someone put a mug of mulled cider in my hand. I found my bearings again, gradually.

The party continued, evolving into a ghost-story-telling circle. Charlie told two, marvelously spooky tales, of course, and, to my surprise, Joy told one that was genuinely frightening. I'd never thought of her as into that sort of thing. All the other stories were told my students, one after the other, late into the night.

While all that storytelling occurred, I could have found Charlie and asked my questions. But I didn't. There is a way in which Charlie is scarier than any ghost story, and I was in no mood to challenge him. I sought out Allen instead.

"Allen?"

"Hmm?" He turned his head slightly towards me, but kept looking at the fire, kind of mesmerized.

"I have a question."

"Glad to hear it."

"Do you...talk about us?"

He looked at me and the corners of his mouth twitched up in a bit of a smile.

"Define 'you' and 'talk about' and 'us,'" he said, and then looked back at the fire.

I took a deep breath.

"Do you, the masters, share information among yourselves about the private lives of us, students."

A quick chuckle, like he'd been caught, and a quick, sideways grin.

"Congratulations, Daniel," he said, almost smirking.

I snorted and turned away. I'm sure I was blushing furiously.

"We're human," he hastened to explain. Then: "How many of your friends did you tell that I'm bisexual?"

"Three," I admitted, embarrassed. He had me. He totally had me.

What I'd actually told them was that I thought he might be, based on something ambiguous Allen had said about his past. I didn't much care, one way or the other, there are a lot of "out" gay and bi people on campus and it isn't a big deal, but Allen's slipperiness inspires speculation. If he is bi, I doubt he's closeted, it's just private information that doesn't come up much, and he's being mysterious about it with me in order to yank my chain. Notice that his wording, "how many did you tell that I'm bisexual," doesn't actually clarify the matter. I could have told them wrong.

Anyway, I'd always gossiped about teachers, ever since I was little. Everyone I knew did. I never stopped to think about how they might feel about it. I'd never really stopped to think that "teachers" are human. And this was Allen, my friend.  I was both embarrassed and ashamed and I could not look at him.

"I'm sorry," I told him, and meant it.

"Thank you," he said, and clearly meant it. "But we know you do it, that's why we don't let you see anything we really don't want you to talk about."

"So, why do you talk about us," I asked. "I'd think...you seem too professional to gossip."

"We're human, like I said...but we don't gossip. We exchange information. On Fridays, at our dinner meetings, we talk about what we know of all of you."

"Why? It's not any of your business."

"Sometimes it is. Knowing more about you helps us with our teaching--Charlie's reassurance to you tonight, for example. And it keeps us from gossiping. You know how information gets distorted as it's passed along? This way, we each get our information directly, and we can see it for what it's worth. We can question and challenge our sources."

"Huh." I felt kind of mollified, but not completely.

"So, how did you know about, about me and Joanna?"

"That I can't tell you. I need to protect my professional secrets, you know?"

"Allen?"

"Hmm?"

"One of the Sprouts said I'm almost not a student. Did he just mean because I'm getting ready to graduate, or...a couple of you have said things like that, over the past few months. As though you expect me to...join you. Do you know something about that I don't?"

I could hear Allen's smile in his voice, this time. When he turned to face me his face lay in shadow, but his voice was clear.

"No, Daniel. We don't know anything. I'm a magician, not a prognosticator. I have every confidence you can earn your green ring if you want to, but I don't know if you'll want to, and I don't know what openings may come up or whether you'll be available when they do." Remember, earning master status mean's you're eligible to get a job with the school, but it's no guarantee you'll be hired.

"We don't know whether you'll join us," he said. "We talk like that because we're hoping you do."

Year 4: Part 6: Mabon

Happy Mabon.

The rest of the Northern Hemisphere now agrees with Kit; it is Fall. The days are getting short, there is a real hint of color in the trees, the meadows are full of goldenrods and asters, and the mornings are usually cool, though not cold. There is still a definite hint of late summer, especially in the afternoons, and occasionally we still have a hot day, but I agree with Kit, now; it has been the season of transition for weeks. The idea of the same season holding sway over an entire hemisphere at once seems strange to me--I have a cousin in New York, and it isn't Fall there yet. Why should it be? These are different places, different countries.

I'm taking for granted so many ideas that used to seem strange to me.

Anyway, I had me nephew with me again for the Mabon festivities (my niece is still too young--she's not walking yet). He's just past two, now, and so I let him spend a lot of time running around with the other Sprouts. I was nervous about that--he seems so very small, hardly more than a walking baby, and of course my sister-in-law would kill me if anything bad happened to him--and I'd let her kill me. I mean, I'd feel so awful. But, as Kit pointed out, the older Sprouts know more about taking care of toddlers than I do, and they'll keep an eye on him.

So I was free to wander around, mostly on my own, like any other student, sampling food and drink and marveling at the unusually large vegetables at the harvest fair set up on the Central Field. This year there was a whole selection of quick breads to choose from, made with different kinds of squash and fruit and nuts. I liked the acorn squash and raisin bread best, and ate quite a lot of it.

At the cider-tasting tent I ran into Charlie--around here, "cider" usually means hard cider, since we have no refrigeration, but they've just pressed a couple of batches, so there were non-alcoholic ciders there, too. Anyway, I saw him a few seconds before he saw me, then our eyes met--and his face went hard and blank and he turned away.

Everyone thinks that Charlie is a curmudgeon who growls at people because he doesn't like human beings. And, in fact, I think he does like other species a lot better, but I don't think that's really it. I've seen his gentleness with the vulnerable, with children and small animals, and I've seen the way his face and body relax when he's in the company of people he trusts. And I saw how sad he looked last week when I was so angry with him for lying to me, for deliberately hurting my feelings by telling me my spot in the woods was going to be cut down. It wasn't, he just had to check to see if I really cared--that was his final exam for me, part of his job, as he saw it, the job I asked, even begged him to do almost four years ago. He knew I'd pass the exam, knew what those few seconds of mistaken grief would be like for me, and knew there was a chance I might not wholly forgive him for it. And he did it anyway, but it made him very sad.

He turned away from me in the cider tent because he did not want to see me turn away from him.

I've known people who didn't especially care for me. Most people like me, superficially, at least, but not everyone really cares and that ok. And I've known people who hold me special, who do genuinely care. That's ok, too, more than ok, in fact. But I've never known anyone else, except maybe my Dad, who cared about me and liked me and unhesitatingly did something that might alienate me, simply because they believed I needed it--no one else except Charlie.

I attended the Paleolithic Feast over lunch, along with most of campus, which of course Charlie runs, but we didn't speak to each other then, except to sort of details of where I should put the dish I brought and whether he needed me to help set up chairs, that sort of thing. He didn't seem hostile at all, he wasn't not speaking to me, but he did seem distant, closed off. My heart kind of hurt.

After lunch, I went to the Thank You Doll build instead of the Gratitude Circle I went to last year and my first year. Sarah runs the build, but Charlie always attends, just like Kit always attends the circle. The two avoid each other, and while Charlie doesn't get in to the snippy stuff Kit does, I think the situation bothers him somehow. These are the two main events of the afternoon, and they happen at the same time, so you can't do both. I think Charlie was glad to see that I'd chosen his.

The build itself went really well. This year we made the Doll mostly out of red potatoes (potatoes come in all different colors, red, white, yellow, blue, and lots of sizes and shapes), with tiny blue potatolets (tubers that hadn't come to full size by harvest, for whatever reason) stuck on for eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and fingers and toes. We used a large potato as a big butt in the back, for balance, and a small one stuck on the back of the head, like a bun, as the foundation of the hairstyle--we made a sort of fan-shaped halo of blue potato slices and behind that, stuck on to the "bun," a large fan of dried grass heads, all of the large Seteria species that look like big, golden caterpillars.

The hairdo was Megan's idea, Megan being one of the Sprouts, one of Charlie's many grand-nieces. Her twin sister suggested we give the Doll some clothes, which we did my making a skirt out of curly kale leaves. We didn't have any kale in the box of veggies Sarah had brought, because it's pretty perishable, but Adelee, one of Sarah's daughters, ran and got some for us. All the remaining Sprouts, except my nephew, Aidan, and Alexis, are either Sarah or Charlie's relatives, so we had all of them except Alexis helping with the build. It's a fun activity anyway, especially for kids.

When we woke the Doll up, my nephew listened for its voice and, once again, he heard it, or said he did. I still want to know what that's like. I could have asked Aidan, or Billie, or Julius, or Adelee, each of whom have been the youngest in the group at least once and heard the Doll, and who now have strong enough language skills to explain the experience, but I didn't ask.

Some mysteries are better left unplumbed.

Afterwards, while we were cleaning up, I approached Charlie.

"Thank you," I told him, simply.

For a moment he did not speak, just looked at me.

"You're welcome," he told me, gruffly, and turned away to consolidate compost buckets. But I could almost feel the tension drain from his body. I could feel him lighten somehow. I haven't studied him for four years for nothing.

Year 2: Part 8: Post 6: Friends and Family

Ok to finish up this little series, giving brief descriptive blurbs of my various "characters," here are friends and family of community members. That is, these are people who are neither staff nor students of the school, but have been part of my story nonetheless. The idea, once again, is that if you lose track of who I'm talking about you can always come back to this post and look them up by name.

Of course, these are just a small fraction of the friends and family I got to know--and there are a lot of people who have been associated with the school over the years whom I have never known, or have met only once and briefly. The people on this list are those whom I have mentioned before and am likely to mention again.

Alexis

Alexis  is Allen's youngest child. She was three when I arrived at school--much younger than her siblings. Allen sometimes refers to her as the best accident he ever had and proof that some surprises are good. He says this in her presence--when she was little it made her giggle. Now she says "Dad," and rolls her eyes fondly. I used to think she was his favorite, but he has told me recently that she is simply the one with whom he is most affectionate--he is just as close with the other two, but in very different ways.

She looks more like him that the other two do, with dark hair, a somewhat short stature, and a pretty, round face--her face is like both her parents.

Carly

Carly is my daughter. She's not quite two. I talk about her in the interludes sometimes. Yes, "Carly" is short for "Caroline" and no, she isn't named after my editor. I've been asked. So far she has very light brown curly hair and brown eyes and is just about average for her age in terms of size and shape. She is, in most respects, a normal toddler. That's not the way I see her, of course, but I am biased.

Cecilly 

Cecilly is my little sister. She was still in high school most of the time I was a novice. She is short, round, and curvy--not fat, she would want me to point out--with ash-blonde hair. She came out as a lesbian a few years ago and is now engaged to a wonderful woman we all like a lot. That really explained some things--in high school she dated boys, but her choices were always a bit strange. First she only dated boys our parents liked and then she switched and only dated boys they hated, as a dry run for shocking them, I suppose.

Cuppa Joe

Cuppa  Joe is Security Joe's husband (there were several Joe's on campus, so most of them used nicknames). He lived on campus and usually came to breakfast and to other community events, but he was neither staff nor student and never had been. I believe he paid a small fee for room and board. He worked as a grocery manager at a supermarket in town, though he has since retired.

He is tall and thin and stoops a little, with a narrow face and a beaklike nose. His skin is dark, for a white man. He has always, since I've known him, worn a somewhat messy-looking mustache, the kind that looks like it might strain soup. When I first met him he was in his early sixties and his hair and most of his mustache were still black. Now both are nearly all-white.

Dad 

My Dad, obviously. He's tall, like both me and my brother, but much broader, like an average build scaled up. He was in his forties when I started school. I don't know how well he comes off in the blog--he was worried about me when I was in school, for one thing, and has never quite understood what this community means to me (he has tried).

But my Dad has always been my champion. He's seldom known why I do what I do, but he's always been certain I can do it. Until I met Charlie, he was the smartest, most competent guy I knew, and my first teacher.

David

David is Allen's son. He was eleven when I joined the school. He's 26 now and has just gotten his master's degree in ecology or something similar. He's at least considering going for his PhD. He's one of those guys who seems to know everything within his field of expertise.--he's quiet, reserved, and very confident. He also plays rock-and-roll guitar. He is obviously Allen's relative and has similar coloration, but he is somewhat taller and slimmer, with a more rectangular face. Everyone who likes guys seems to have a crush on him, but as far as I know he has yet to have his first serious romance.

When I first knew him as a child, all of the above (except the guitar) was more or less already true. He was a skinny, dark-haired kid, somewhat moody, and already an accomplished birder.

June

June is my wife. I don't think I've used her name yet in the blog. I always just call her "my wife." Which sounds really sexist on my part, but I really didn't mean it that way. I've just been ambivalent about how much of my private life away from school--and thus the private lives of my family--I wanted to share. I wasn't sure she really needed to be in this blog. But apparently I can't stop talking about her. She is tall and blonde, with those long smooth curves that look like she started out as a short, curvy woman and stretched. I still sometimes turn into a doofus in her presence.

(I should point out that June is also the name of one of Charlie's nieces, but I seldom write about her).


I didn't know June back when I was a novice, of course, so I've only referred to her in the interludes. We met in grad school, during my Absence. She was smart enough to realize that marrying me would mean marrying into the school. I am lucky enough that she said yes to both.

John

My big brother, though I don't think I've ever actually used his name in the blog. He is tall, like me, but somewhat heavier-built--he's a normal-looking, tall, slim, muscular guy, whereas I am skinny and bony and awkward. I always say he is the handsome one in the family, and his wife says I am right and my wife says I am wrong. His hair is darker than mine and he's usually clean-shaven.

He has a wife and children, whom I have mentioned in the blog but not yet by name.

Julie

Julie is Allen's second child and older daughter. I do not know her well as an adult, as she went to college several states away and has not moved back. She was ten when I joined the school. She had blonde hair then and has light brown hair now.

Lo

Lo is Allen's wife. She has never worked at the school and never lived there, but she visited often and I've had occasion to spend a lot of time with the family. She also is a psychologist, though a somewhat more conventional one than Allen--she sees clients, mostly adults, in a home office.

She is on the tall side, for a woman, and often wears high heels. He hair is light brown, like her daughter's, but she dyes it blonde. She looks, in terms of how she dresses and how she does her hair, rather like someone from an '80's sit-com. Think Angela, of Who's the Boss. I've never asked her about it, but I think she found her "look" as a young woman and simply decided to stick with it. I'm not sure I'd say we are close--she doesn't talk about personal stuff with me, or with anyone, so far as I know (except, I assume, Allen). But she is a warm and unfailingly generous woman.

Mario

Mario was Charlie's older brother, but died some years ago. I do not know if they were close--Charlie never discussed his brother's death with me, except to say that it had happened. I met him on only a few occasions; he was an old man, with white hair and a slightly vague air. He was about the same height as Charlie but much more lightly built. They did not look much alike.

I have heard that Mario fought in World War II and that he lied about his age in order to do so. I have a hard time imagining him as a patriotic, adventurous teenager, but he must have been one. He had two sons, Robert and Paul, whom I have met, and numerous grandchildren who spent much of their childhoods running around campus.

I remember being shocked to find that this old man was Charlie's brother. Charlie had very quickly come to seem ageless to me.

Maria

Maria is Charlie's little sister. Her real first name is Theresa. Her middle name is Mary, and she was called Mary as a kid. But while Mario actively hid his Italian heritage (his accent used to be much stronger, I've heard) and Charlie mostly ignored his, the youngest and most fully assimilated child decided to explore and exaggerate her ethnic background. She studied Italian in school, learned to cook Italian food, and Italicized her name.

She is short, quite fat in a comfortable-looking way, and very curvy. He hair is long, grey, and curly. It looks like a fall of grey yarn. She has a pile of kids and grand kids who also spent much of their childhoods on campus.

Mom

My mother, of course. She has brown hair and an average height and build. My Mom and I have never connected much, but there's no complexity to that, no drama--it's not like anything is especially wrong between us. She took good care of me when I was little. She's become good friends with my wife. We're starting to talk more because I call her whenever there's something I can't figure out with my daughter.

Kit's Husband

His name is Kevin, though I haven't referred to him as anything but "Kit's husband" in the blog, and I've rarely actually heard him called by name in real life. He has a lot of nicknames--almost everyone calls him something different. He introduces himself as Kevin, and then when you start calling him something else, you know you're friends.

I did not initially want Kevin to exist. It's not like I expected, or even really wanted, to ever date Kit--part of the whole point of that crush was that she was obviously unattainable and therefore safe. I was 19 and she was in her forties. But my Mom has told me about how women of her generation would get upset when one of the Beatles, or Prince Charles, or some other eligible celebrity bachelor got married. It's not that they ever really thought it could have been them--but it was fun to pretend otherwise.

But he's actually a great guy. He's a professional musician and tours regionally with a folk rock group. He also has a jazz group he plays with sometimes and he and some of his friends sometimes play pagan gatherings and events as the openly Wiccan group Blue Pixies. He's short, of average build, with dark hair with some grey in it. He wears a neat pepper-and-salt beard.

Susan

Susan is Greg's sister. I have met her on only a few occasions and never for long. She is a very charming woman, but somewhat commandeering--once she starts talking with you, she seldom lets you leave. She and Greg are both mixed-race, children of a Japanese immigrant and an American white man, but unlike Greg, Susan looks mostly Japanese. She's slightly on the short side of average. She has a very pretty, glowing smile. By the time I met her, her long black hair has turned a soft grey.