Year 4: Part 7: Post 3: Interruption 1

Rather than do an ordinary post, I want to take this opportunity to write about these extraordinary past couple of days have looked in our community. We are, in some ways, very much like the rest of the left-leaning part of this country, after all—and in other ways we are probably very different. This is a little long, so I’ve divided it into three posts. They are ALL this week’s post. This is important.

I spent election night with my family, by which I mean not just my wife and daughter, but Allen and Kit and their families. I get together with Allen and Kit, plus a varying assortment of partners and children, at least once a week for one thing or another. Last Tuesday (was it only on Tuesday?), my sister, Cecilly, and her fiancée, Joya (no relation to the master, Joy), joined us, too, for dinner and to watch the election returns.

I think we’d had some notion of the event becoming a celebration. None of us discussed the possibility that Trump might win, but whether because it was an unthinkable likelihood or something we honestly didn’t expect, I can’t quite say. As I've posted before, we did not all agree on whom we wanted to win, but we did all agree on whom we wanted to lose.

The first few states they called were all expected, one for one candidate, the other for the other. Vermont went Democrat, of course. Then there started to be more red on the board than blue. We told ourselves that all these states were the expected ones, that Florida and Pennsylvania were too close to call but would surely go to the Democrats, that there was nothing to worry about…but gradually we got worried.

I’m not honestly sure why. I don’t remember a point when any single state (except Pennsylvania, much later in the night) surprised anyone, so I don’t know how we got from expecting Hillary to win to knowing she wouldn’t, but somehow it happened for us. It happened for the pundits and newscasters on PBS Newshour, too, all of whom are presumably liberal even if they can’t quite say so on TV. I saw fear in their eyes. I have never seen fear in journalists before.

Kit started showing the strain first. She got jittery, hyper. She stood up and sat back down and paced, chewing on her thumbnail. Then the rest of us got quiet. Cecilly and Joya unobtrusively linked hands.

“What happens if Trump wins?” asked my daughter, Carly. She’s almost four.

“People like me and Joya don’t get to have a life,” and Cecilly. She was staring darkly at the TV screen. I think I’d better explain that not only is Joya a woman, she’s also Bangladeshi. Her family came here (legally) when she was very small, and she’s in the process of becoming a US citizen, but she isn’t one yet. She's a brown-skinned citizen of a Muslim-majority country (she's actually a lapsed Hindu). So, yes, a lot of this is very personal to them. To us.

Carly’s eyes widened.

“Don’t tell that to my daughter!” I said. I realized my hands had formed fists. I deliberately released them. I don’t hit people. But you don’t say things like that to my kid.

“We’ll, it’s true,” said Joya, some acid in her voice. “Just because—“

“Bullshit,” I told her, cutting her off. “It’s only half the truth. It’s not even that. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Don’t frighten my daughter with wild speculation she can’t do anything about.”

Joya, looked daggers at me. She doesn’t know me well, yet. To her, I’m her white prospective brother-in-law-- straight, cis, male, and white, privileged every which way. When push comes to shove, I am Other to her. Fine. But don’t you frighten my daughter.

“What is the truth you want to tell her, then?” she asked me.

I had to think for a bit. Carly looked up at me. They all looked up at me. I was the only one standing. I am very tall and it makes me easy to look at. I wished they’d all look somewhere else. I knelt and held Carly by her tiny shoulders.

“Donald Trump is a very mean man,” I told her. “He is a bully. And if he becomes president, he will have a lot of power. He will be in charge of the army and he will be in charge of making sure the government does its job. He will basically be the boss of the entire country. And having a mean bully be the boss will make everything we’ve worked for, everything we care about, harder, much harder. But not impossible. Not impossible. And we are going to keep fighting just as hard as we can. Do you understand?”

She nodded. I let go of her shoulders. She ran off and got out some paper. I returned my attention to the TV. They’d just called another state for Trump.

A few minutes later, Carly ran up to us, waving the drawing she’d made, a scribble in blue crayon.

“I made a bird!” she announced proudly. “To help Hillary win!” I think she must be remembering the Bernie bird. We attached the bird to the TV, for luck. As the hours went by, one after another of us curled up in blankets on the couches or on the floor. None of us wanted to stop watching, as though by watching we could somehow influence the outcome. I remember yawning….

I woke to Allen’s voice.

“It’s over.”

I sat up and looked around. Some of us had fallen asleep and were waking around me. Allen, of course, had not. He keeps odd hours. Kit had not. She was too anxious and angry. She clicked the TV off as though the remote control were a magic wand that could make Trump’s victory go away.

“Goddamn it!” she said, an odd curse from a Wiccan, but it’s her favorite and she always comes back to it. “Damn Republicans. Damn Christians. Damn men.” I saw her close her eyes and her lashes were wet with tears already.

“Uh, some of us are men,” Allen pointed out.

“And some of us are Christian,” I added.

She waved her arms in a helpless away and stuttered a bit. Allen and I looked at each other and smiled a little, the way you do when someone you care about is being characteristically strange. The thing is, Kit isn't really as biased as she sounds, she just uses the words "men" and "Christian" narrowly, to mean the negative aspects of those groups. We knew her first reaction had been to say “No you’re not, you’re people,” and that she'd caught herself and was now struggling to come up with something that sounded better.

“You’re not the men and the Christians I’m talking about,” she managed, finally.

We discussed sleeping arrangements. I wanted the others to stay over. I’m thirty-five years old and I have a job and a kid and a master’s degree (and a green ring) but I still feel like a kid sometimes and I wanted the presence of more adulty-adults—in my head, of course, that means my former professors, Allen and Kit. What I actually said was that it was so late and they shouldn’t have to drive anywhere. June said they were welcome, but pointed out we don’t have a guest bedroom. We have no space for eight houseguests, except on the couches and floor.

Kev, Kit’s husband, begged off first, saying he had to get Kit home. She wouldn’t sleep if there were people around her to take care of. She smiled a little lamely and started gathering her stuff. I looked to Allen, a little desperately, maybe.

“I don’t have anything useful to say tonight,” he said, knowing why I wanted him to stay. “None of this makes any sense to me.” It’s true that Allen’s version of anger leans heavily towards an increasingly hysterical and unhelpful confusion. He doesn’t understand why people make decisions that hurt other people and he’ll exhaust himself trying to figure it out, like someone trying to solve a Rubix cube by force.

“Ok,” said, disappointed. “I’ll put Carly to bed.” And I picked her up. She was limp with sleep, but when I settled her against my shoulder, she wriggled, grunted, and rubbed her eyes. She lifted her head, not quite awake, looked at me, and made a questioning noise.

“Carly, baby, it’s time for bed,” I explained “The election’s over.”

“Who won?” She asked, mumbling.

“Trump did.”

She came awake at once, taking charge of her limbs and wriggling out of my embrace. She landed on the floor and looked around at us in aggrieved confusion.

“But…but…but I drew a bird and everything!”

“Oh, baby!” cried Kit, full of sympathy, “that kind of magic doesn’t always work.” And she held out her arms to my child, who climbed into her lap. June went over and wrapped her arms around both of them, burying her face in Kit’s fire-and-silver hair.

An hour or so later, after everyone but my sister and her partner (who had planned to stay the night anyway, as they live further away) had left, I “put the apartment to bed,” as we say, checking locks and lights and the pilot light on the stove. Then I went to the bathroom.

When I came out again, the place was dark, but Joya and Cecilly were still sitting up on the couch in the living room. Joya was crying and Cecilly was kissing away her tears. I left them there, pretending I had not seen.

Year 4: Part 4: Post 4: World History

Last week I realized I hadn’t talked about my classes this semester at all—so, I talked about one. But I’m taking three. The other two are World History: Asia and World History: India, both with Greg. And, honestly, I wish I wasn’t taking both at once.

When I was a kid, and then in high school, history was mostly presented as a single, long story. The story began in Sumeria or Egypt with the beginning of civilization, moved to Greece, from there to Rome, and from there to northern and Western Europe, and finally to North America. I’m serious, I took several World History classes, starting in elementary school (that was just called History Class, but we did a World History unit), and every single one of them began the story in what is now Iraq. 

Did any of them address anything that happened in Iraq over the more recent 2500 years? Of course not. Sumeria invented cuneiform writing and agriculture and then went on hiatus until Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the early 1990’s.

That’s not how Greg tells the story.

When Greg teaches history, the locus of the story doesn’t move. Instead, each area has its own story, from which civilizations come and go, and which is the center of the world from its own, valid perspective.

So, Indian history is all about India, from the earliest records of the Indus Valley civilization down to the present day. Asian history is mostly China and Mongolia, two great cultures twining around each other, the one predominately agricultural and settled, the other predominately pastoral and nomadic.  I mean, that's what the class covers. Asia is a big continent and obviously there are more than two countries in it.

Of course, neither class can do more than touch on the stories and cultures of either place, but it’s more than most of us knew about these places before. And Greg’s primary mission, I think, is to show us what the world looks like with a different center. I mean, all my life “Mongolia” has been a synonym for “strange and far away,” but there are millions of people for whom it is simply “here.”

But I’m taking these two classes at once, so on any given day I have to think, where is the center of the world today? Am I thinking about India, or am I thinking about Asia?

Especially in my first year, but often since then, I’ve found my classes reinforcing each other, commenting on each other, even when the masters in question seldom communicated, as with Charlie and Kit. This is the first time the opposite has happened, where two classes have conflicted. And they are both taught be the same man!

I was thinking about this—what’s it like for Greg? I mean, he’s teaching the two classes, does he ever get confused? Especially since he’s also still teaching all these workshops on Islamic history, and last week there was his talk on the American Revolution and next month there’ll be Hiroshima Day and Nagasaki Day. How does he maintain his focus on so many different centers?

When I first got here, there was a lot of talk about ways in. Athletics could be a way in, art could be a way in, spellwork could be a way in….Well, maybe history can be a way in. And maybe the gap that you actually go through to get in lies between Asia and India.

Year 4: Part 3: Post 7: Memorial

Reminder to readers: this narrative is set 13 years ago, so at the time of this post, the invasion of Iraq had just been prematurely declared successful and the war in Afghanistan was causing a slow but steady trickle of coalition causalities. -D.

Memorial Day is one of those occasions when we don't get time off from classes and we don't have a campus-wide celebration, but Greg does a talk on history and we are all strongly encouraged to attend. This year, though something was different--this year, the US is quite clearly at war.

It's curious how, today, we are both more connected to the outside world than normal and more out-of-step from it. On the one hand, we're talking quite deliberately about current events--politics, news, what's going on in the Middle East and why. There are days when it feels like we're living in a bubble, some idealized Avalon, a world all our own. Today is not one of those days. On the other hand, in the larger world, today is the cultural first day of summer--and we already had that, back on Beltane.

My Dad always has a big outdoor party on or near Memorial Day. As I've said, he's a serious grill-freak, and while he never actually puts his grill away for the season--he's cooked Easter Dinner on it, some years--in the summer he likes to have these parties, with big mountains of meat and even vegetables, for our friends and neighbors. Memorial Day is the first one.

My Mom enjoys the parties, but she disapproves of the way such things take over Memorial Day, distracting from the real reason for the holiday. She disapproves of the commercialization of Christmas and President's Day and all the rest of it, for the same reason. But I've told her that I don't think Memorial Day is really a case of commercialization. I think America is trying to celebrate Beltane, the beginning of summer, and just doesn't have a better day for it. And summer is worth celebrating. She likes that idea and says it may be true.

Anyway, Greg gave his talk this year in the Chapel after dinner--usually he does it outside on the central field, but today it was raining, a light, gentle mist that wouldn't let up.

He told us about the history of the day, like he always does, how it began as a day to decorate the graves of the Civil War dead, and talked some about the different ways people have conceptualized the dead of wars over the years--as heroes and as victims--and about the importance of seeing them as individuals.

"Each is an individual, personal death, and each was an individual life, with his or her own reasons for going to war, embedded in and reflecting the various cultural and historical threads of the time," he said.

All that is about what he's done in previous years. This year he said more. He talked about an individual dead soldier, Lori Piestewa, whose death was made public last month. She was the first American woman to die in combat in Iraq and the first Hopi woman to die in combat abroad. She interested Greg for several reasons, he said--first, her death was high-profile enough that a fair amount of information about her is available, obviously important if you want to do a talk on something, though Greg isn't sure how much of the information is true.

Second, she was Native American, allowing Greg to talk about the long and complicated history of Native Americans in the US military, a story with some interesting parallels to the history of Japanese-Americans in the US military, a subject obviously close to Greg's heart.

Third, Piestewa was Hopi, and as such largely pacifist, as Greg is. He said he had not been able to find out how she reconciled pacifism with going to war, but he speculated about some possibilities, including the fact that joining the military is often the only option for young people from poor families who want to get ahead. And poverty and race are strongly linked in America.

"Ostensibly," he finished, "the invasion of Iraq has succeeded, the war is complete. And yet fighting continues and there is no sign of the weapons of mass destruction we supposedly went in there to find. The war in Afghanistan continues. In the two wars combined, over 260 American soldiers have died so far--a small number, overall, but there will be more. How many Iraqis? How many Afghanis? We don't know. They won't tell us. Maybe if we pay more attention to these things there will be fewer wars."

And he sat down. Steve Bees stood up.

Paying attention has been a major part of Steve's education, so far. Steve, as I've said, asked Greg to help him build a better awareness of social justice issues, especially the real challenges and concerns of poor people and people of color. He's trying to break through the obliviousness that he says comes with growing up as a white, cis-gendered, straight male. Greg is Buddhist, and as such is very concerned with both awareness and compassion. Apparently that translates into making Steve learn a fantastic amount of historical and anthropological detail--when the Invasion of Iraq began a few months ago, Greg set Steve to learning the geography and history of Iraq as well as studying who joins the US military and why. As Greg says, perhaps if we pay more attention, there will be fewer wars.

Anyway, Steve is also Kit's student. He's been taking voice lessons from Kit and has made a lot of progress over the past year. And so, after Greg was done speaking, Steve sang. He sang a single Don McLean song, a Capella.

And the rain fell like pearls on the leaves of the flowers
Leaving brown, muddy clay where the earth had been dry.
And deep in the trench he waited for hours,
As he held to his rifle and prayed not to die.

The song went on for several verses, simple, vivid, without much overt editorial comment and with very little melody, almost musical talking, rising and rising in intensity and then falling again to the simple, stark last line: he's gone.

Year 4: Part 2: Post 7: Seasons of Change

Every year I talk about how spring seems to always be just now arriving, from the first blooming of trees in March to the full greening of campus late in April or early May. I keep thinking "ok, now it's spring." And then the next week something else sprouts or blooms and I think it again.

I've noticed the same thing with how Aidan is growing. It seems like for years now he's been just starting to talk.

He said his first words when he was just over a year old, though I didn't actually hear him talk until months later. Then, when he was around two, he started using a lot more words, a lot more complex sentences, so it seemed like he had really started to talk. I think I posted about it. Now, he's just past three, and he's really talking, using more or less complete grammar and mostly correct pronunciation (except he still says "gweens" and "aminals" and such things).

Not that he talks often. He's kind of a quiet boy.

I don't babysit him much, but I understand that watching him is getting both easier and harder. Easier because he can follow rules and instructions and some sense of judgment, so you can tell him "stay where I can see you" and he will. Harder because he's also able to make innocent  mistakes or to disobey, so when he gets in trouble he can get in trouble seriously. And one minute he seems to know everything and be able to do everything, so you let him do things, and then the next minute he's obviously a toddler again.

All this, too, is a process that has been unfolding since he learned how to crawl.

Kayla hardly ever babysits him these days. She's busy being a student and being a teenager, and since he's been weaned completely for about a year now, there are whole days that go by when she hardly sees him. That's ok--the idea was always for Sadie to raise him.

During the day, Sadie is usually in the kitchens or off-campus at this restaurant she's started. He can't really go with her, so he gets passed around the various masters. Sometimes he'll even turn up in class and sit quietly in the back, coloring.

Actually, this past week we were talking about the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in class--the anniversary of his death was April 4th--and Aidan jumped into the conversation.

"He didn't get killed because he was black," the child asserted. "He got killed because he was nice to all the people and mean people are scared of nice people so the mean people killed him."

Greg looked a bit startled, but recovered himself.

"Interesting point, Aidan," he said, speaking as he might to any other student. "Do you care to elaborate?"

Aidan put down his crayons and spoke up.

"A lot of people think Martin Lufer King was killed because he was black and because he was nice to black people on buses and stuff. But he was nice to white people and pink people and green people and purple people, too. Like, if they didn't have any money he would help them get money and if people were mean to them and told them to take out the garbage all the time he would say 'no, you have to be nice!' And that is why mean people killed him. Because sometimes mean people just want to be mean, so if you tell them not to be mean they kill you or put you in jail. So that's why it's important to be brave and nice, not just nice all by itself."

And he picked up his crayon again and went back to coloring.

"You are right, for the most part," said Greg. "Where did you learn all that?"

"I don't know. It might have been Steve Bees or somebody like that."

Steve is in American History of Dissent, of course, and he shrugged helplessly and looked completely dumbfounded. Aidan seemed completely unaware he'd said anything extraordinary. His drawing just looked like multicolored scribbles, no hint of a recognizable image at all.

The boy is starting to talk, but the thing is he hears everything and remembers most of it.

Year 3: Part 5: post 8: Returning

So, I'm back among people now and...everything's different. Human beings seems noisy and intrusive. Society seems arbitrary. Being dry when it's raining, or even just taking a crap indoors, all seem weird. Not that I necessarily dislike being dry and comfortable, there's just this persistent sense of oddness in everything I do. As though in a profound way, I am still outside of something.

Charlie says that living in the woods alone for two weeks is unlikely to make any permanent change in me, that I'll start taking campus life for granted again over the next few days. And yeah, I'm already feeling more normal than I did when I first got back. He says if I want to I can use the memory of this sense of strangeness deliberately, to help be get and retain a better perspective on society, but I get the feeling that's not really his objective in giving me this assignment. He's not trying to make me feel like an alien, even if feeling like an alien can occasionally be useful.

I'm not sure what his objective is, but we seem to be progressing towards it. He's given me a new assignment. For the next year I'm supposed to average one night outdoors per week, always in that small area he has defined for me. I'm allowed to do several nights out in one week to bank time so that I don't have to go out in really bad weather, but I do have to spend at least one night out each month. I can't, say, skip February.

Again, it's not an exercise in outdoor survival; I can bring out whatever gear I need to stay warm and dry and I'm supposed to carry up all my own food and water. I'm allowed to have visitors, but not to the extent of not experiencing where I am. And I'm not allowed to bring anything like a radio or a CD player, nor can I bring reading material, except for for field guides. A day counts as a minimum of fourteen hours, so if I arrive on site at five thirty in the evening, I have to stay until seven thirty the next morning or it doesn't count. I'll be able to attend classes at least.

I'll also have assignments within the assignment. I'm supposed to keep a journal and make at least one entry per night out. Each week I'm supposed to hand my journal in to Charlie so that he can make comments and suggestions and ask me to do, write about, or learn about specific things when I go back out.

"My new notebook!" I said, realizing why he'd given me a blank write-in-the-rain field notebook for my birthday.

"Yes, if you want to. It's a good brand--I use them. But you can use that book for anything or nothing, if you want to. It's your present." He shrugged a little, to show that his feelings wouldn't be hurt if I didn't use the thing, I suppose. "Happy birthday," he added, a fond twinkle in his eye, briefly. Funny, I don't normally see that from him.

I did go out for my belated birthday celebration a couple of days after I got back. This time I thought to ask Charlie to come, but he begged off, saying he had papers to grade.

Besides my twenty-second birthday, my time in the woods made me miss Greg's talk on Labor Day and the history of the labor movement (he didn't do that last year--I think the talk was, in part, a response to a request from Steve Bees) and the campus observation of the anniversary of the attacks on nine-eleven. I have heard it took the form of a memorial gathering for those victims of the attacks that people with some connection to our community knew. Odd that I missed that and didn't even think of it while I was out. I'd lost track of the days.

My parents, of course, think this whole sleeping in the woods think sounds onerous and even dangerous. They think Charlie is being strange and ridiculous to make me do it. And yet they both go camping when they get the chance. If I'd told them the whole thing was my idea, I think they would have been happy for me.

Human beings are odd, sometimes.

Excuse me, a note

I haven't been posting on Fridays and this isn't an ordinary post, I just want to say a few words about September 11th, since that is the day we have landed upon.

Curious how a date that occurs every year becomes the name of a specific, isolated event? I've written about that before....

Anyway, I ended up writing less about the attacks over the past year than I intended to, as though we saw the news, reacted to it, and everything went back to normal a week or two later. It didn't, of course. Two graduates of the school died that day, no one I knew, but some of the masters were pretty broken up--especially Allen, since one of the two had been his student. Other people on campus had outsider friends or family among the victims.

Security Joe, as a retired cop, went and volunteered at Ground Zero for while. While there, he was exposed to contaminated dust, and while I do not think it has actually affected his health, he will be monitored for it, just in case, for the rest of his life. Several graduates joined the military because of the attacks and one of them died in Afghanistan several years later. Greg became very concerned about rising anti-Arab sentiment and began lecturing, both on campus and off, about the history of the Middle East and Islam. He's still at it, making the rounds of schools, colleges, and libraries every year.

In the months after the attacks, things on campus felt...weird. It's hard to describe, which may be why I didn't end up describing it. I think it was easier for us than for many people in the outside world because we didn't watch TV and so didn't constantly get reminded of those images. Also, a lot of us were in therapy, just as part of being students at the school. But life had divided itself into before and after.

Over the following year, things gradually normalized, if anything at such an extraordinary school can be said to be normal. By the first anniversary, I think most of us felt that the attacks had started to recede into history, that we were moving at last into whatever comes next. There was a memorial of sorts on the anniversary, but I was in the woods still and missed it.

Anyway, I just wanted to add that in.

So, about today's post (extended)

Hi, there,

I've decided that rather than write a normal post, I'll explain a little about why yesterday occasioned a party such that I couldn't post on time. As I said, we had a party after we got the news that the Supreme Court had legalized gay marriage throughout the United States. Obviously, we would be psyched about this, given that I've made clear that our community is very pro-gay-rights--but a lot of people are psyched and still managed to show up for work yesterday, which I, more or less, did not.

So, let me explain.

Our community has always been counter-cultural; the secrecy that we use to protect the entrance exam has also allowed us to essentially ignore laws we did not like. Charlie's hunting without a license springs to mind as an example, as does Allen's support of Ebony's use of cannabis to learn to see. It's not that the community is lawless, as I've tried to describe, it's that we have our own laws and ways of doing things and where these depart from the social and legal conventions of the larger society, we simply keep what we do secret.

I've had mixed feelings about this at times--I think we all have. The tradition of Absence, where a person has to go away for a while before becoming a candidate to be a leader of the community, was our attempt to prevent becoming entirely insular and self-referential. We don't want to become a cult. Plus, being a counterculture has at times been lonely--it makes our relationships with friends and family on the outside difficult, even strained.

We don't want to be a counterculture, basically, only the freedom to treat each other well in ways that might be difficult or impossible otherwise. We're a haven we wish we didn't need.

The contents of this haven, what we actually do inside our counter-cultural bubble, has varied over the years. For example, I understand that in the very beginning there was a lot of recreational drug use, usually but not always as an attempted form of spiritual exploration. By the time I arrived, that standard had long since changed and there was actually a strict rule against any illegal drugs on campus at all. But one of the constants throughout the years we have existed has always been gay rights--including recognition of gay marriage.

When I was a student I knew that everybody spoke of Security Joe and Cuppa Joe as married, even though their legal union had evaporated when Security Joe transitioned. I knew that was very important to them, but it wasn't anything we talked about much--we were never self-congratulatory about all the ways we were different than the surrounding society. Being a straight, cis-gendered white male, I had never before thought much about how the world might look to people who weren't and so I didn't fully appreciate how different the campus culture was until much later. I didn't realize that the community was actually sticking up for something.

I also only gradually came to realize how basic, how original, to our community culture that acceptance was.

The thing is, two of the original Six were a committed gay couple. They died in a car accident years before I arrived, but masters I first knew were friends and students of theirs. I learned their names and part of their story when I found a pair of trees on campus planted in memorial to them and asked questions. Later, I learned more about them, in bits and pieces, as one does as people reminisce about those they knew.

Their names were Shrimp (a nickname, of course--he was very tall) and Jim. Shrimp was an artist and a clown and Jim was a medical doctor. It was Jim who arranged for Charlie to go to rehab. They did not refer to themselves as married--they never imagined they might be allowed to wed--but theirs was obviously a life-long commitment. Part of the reason that the Six has always been a family was that Shrimp and Jim were, and they shared their sense of family with their friends and students--and ultimately with me.

In 1990, when they were both in their 40's, Shrimp and Jim were on their way home from a concert when they were hit by a drunk driver and both killed. Both of them came from homophobic families that essentially denied the existence of their relationship. They had been together for twenty years, but that didn't matter to anyone with any legal claim to their bodies. So, people with an illegal claim intervened.

Both families lived far away, so the masters kindly offered to take care of arranging to have the bodies cremated. Then, during the brief window that they had physical custody of their friends' remains, the masters mixed Shrimp and Jim's ashes. Each of them now has a headstone that makes no mention of the other--yet they are buried together and can never be separated again. Their memorial trees on campus grow intertwined, naturally grafted together by root and stem, and a single mixed sap flows through their tissues.

The Supreme Court decision announced yesterday hinged on a court case brought by a man whose husband had died--he wanted to have their marriage recognized on his husband's death certificate. Yesterday, he got something that Shrimp and Jim never did.

It's kind of difficult to live in a counterculture, especially one that no longer has any physical territory. It's like being an exile in the country of one's birth. The reason we had a party was that yesterday the United States of America suddenly seemed a little more like home.

Year 3: Part 4: Post 2: Juneteenth

Note:this post is rather seriously out of sequence. I wanted to write about Juneteenth in order to address, even indirectly, the recent tragic attack in South Carolina, but the thing is we never observed Juneteenth as a holiday on campus. In my second year, 2001, we came close, though--Greg did an educational event around it, much as he did for Hiroshima Day, Nagasaki Day, and Pearl Harbor Day. He was very much the campus historian and he was always very interested in using history to foster cross-cultural empathy and compassion. But after 9/11he focused his efforts largely on combating discrimination against Muslims and did not address Juneteenth in 2002. So, not only is this post out of sequence because Juneteenth is before Litha, but this was Juneteenth, 2001.- D.

Greg says that white American culture is, collectively, narcissistic. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

He said it during one of the evening talks he does--one of the few that everybody on campus is strongly encouraged to attend. I've noticed these things are kind of like minor, third-tier holidays here--like, for the major holidays of school, the sabbats, we have these campus-wide celebrations. For Christian and Jewish holidays and things like 4th of July and Thanksgiving, we make space and time for those who want to celebrate them to do so. And then there are these things, historical dates, mostly, that we don't exactly celebrate at all but Greg does one of these campus-wide talks, apparently to get us thinking.

This one was for Juneteenth, the nineteenth of June and the anniversary of the freeing of the slaves in Texas.

Why Texas? Apparently, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the slaves in Texas weren't given the memo and were kept captive until well after the end of the Civil War when Federal authorities were finally able to come in and insist. They did so on June nineteenth. And a lot of the freed people immediately moved to other states, spreading the tradition of celebrating that day far and wide.

Apparently for much of the latter half of the 1800s and into the early 1900's, Juneteenth was something like a 4th of July for black people, with baseball games, barbecues, dressing up (something slaves were never allowed to do) and a lot of educational presentations for young people. Then the holiday kind of faded, but it's starting to make a resurgence. I'd never heard about it before, but a few others had.

The thing is that almost everybody here is white. There are exceptions, but it's disproportionate--there are fewer people of color here even than at most colleges. I think it's because so many people here are Neopagan in one way or another, and most (not all) Neopagans are white. So Greg makes a point of trying to broaden our horizons because, as he says, we're culturally narcissistic.

He wasn't accusing us individually of narcissism, but did say that being part of a dominant culture means you can pretend other perspectives don't exist and that if we don't want to be narcissists ourselves we have to make an effort to expose ourselves to ideas and information we might otherwise dismiss. It's much the same as what he said in his class, American Minority Perspectives, but not everybody has taken that, I don't remember him actually using the word "narcissism" then, and anyway I think that talking about slavery especially makes people defensive.

For one reason or another, he got some pushback this time, people wanting to argue.

Joanna stood up and said a lot of us are not members of the dominant culture, being variously pagan, and that in any case those of us who are female or gay or transgendered, are hardly dominant.Various people echoed the sentiment. They sounded angry. Greg held up his hand.

"So, what you're saying is that basically you're not boogeymen?" He paused to let that question sink in before continuing. "The fact of the matter is, no one is a boogeyman. No one is so privileged as to have no claim to any kind of unfairness, ever. This is no one so victimized so as to automatically understand the lives and struggles of all others who have been victimized, ever. This is not a contest and none of you can win."

From there he began talking about different forms of discomfort and fear, encouraging us to sit with those feelings and to listen to others when they talk about their lives, rather than speaking over them. He talked about how different categories of people can overlap so that a person can be both privileged and discriminated against at the same time, depending on context, and that looking for ways to address a problem makes a lot more sense than getting defensive about whose fault it is.

"Acknowledging culpability is part of justice," he said, and then looked around. We were outside, on the central field near the Dining Hall, and he'd spotted a plastic bag stuck in one of the maple trees along the field's edge. There isn't a lot of litter on campus, but it sometimes blows in or something. Then, too, outsiders sometimes come in for one reason or another, and drop things. Greg pointed at the bag and continued. "At the end of the day, I'm less interested in who put that up there than in who is going to get it down."

The thing is, he ended up spending most of his scheduled time responding to these questions and challenges--actually telling the story of Juneteenth went pretty quickly. I wonder if he used the word "narcissist" to incite a challenge so he could respond to it?

Afterwards, I asked him whether what he said worked to absolve people of responsibility for discriminatory or hurtful behavior. He shook his head.

"You're thinking like a judge," he told me, "or a legislator. Trying to establish who should be held accountable for what under what circumstances. That is the exact opposite of what I meant. Don't ask what should happen when they are accused, should they be held accountable for this or that fault. Imagine the question being asked of yourself. Then resolve that no matter what the answer is, you will respond the same way--in service." He looked at me a moment. "It's not like the self you're getting defensive about is real, anyway," he added, with a hint of a twinkle in his eye.

Year 3: Part 3: Post 8: Grace

Note: this year, yesterday (Sunday) was Pentecost and Shavu'ot was the day before. Thirteen years ago, however, Pentecost fell on the 19th of May  and Shavu'ot on the 18th. I had just returned from the Island on the 17th. So this is another occasion where I'm publishing posts a little out of order because of differences in dates from year to year. Today (Monday) is, of course, Memorial Day, but I don't plan to do a Memorial Day post--as far as I recall, we completely ignored it on campus that year.

Yesterday was Pentecost. We celebrated it when I was younger, although it was never a very big deal, and I've even met other Methodists who have never heard of it, which surprised me. It's the day when the Holy Spirit descended onto the Apostles and the other early followers of Jesus, empowering their ministry. Among other things, they gained the power to preach in other languages so that they could carry the Good News to everybody, all over the world. What I remember, mostly, is that the sermon on Pentecost Sunday would usually focus on the universality of the Church and how we should not let social or cultural barriers stand in our way of reaching out to others--a good message.


I also remember that last year I asked Ollie if he planned on leading a service on campus, as he'd lead one on Easter and he looked at me like I was crazy. Apparently, Baptists don't celebrate Pentecost, regarding it as overly ritualistic or something. This year I went to a service at the UU church (they celebrate everything) and thought of him.

He hasn't begun his Absence yet, since he's waiting for Willa to graduate, but I hardly ever hear from him. Probably it's that most of what we did was go running together, and we can't do that now that he's off campus.

I was feeling kind of glum about it, especially since this morning was beautiful weather for running and of course I went alone. So, after I got back from working at the landscaping company, I went into the Mansion, intending to go upstairs and take a shower, but instead I wandered into the library and sat down. It was cool in there and no one except Aaron was about. I've gotten into the habit of talking to him recently, which is kind of funny because he's a librarian and I'd always thought that the main job of a librarian is to tell people not to talk.

I asked him about that once and he made a noise like "pffh!"

"If you want a quiet place to read," he told me, "You can check your book out and go someplace quiet! This is a library. Anyway, if we couldn't talk, how could I help you find your books?"

More recently, I mentioned that I've gotten to like talking to him.

"Yeah, I think a lot of research librarians get that," he said. "We're just kind of there. Like bar tenders."

"People talk to bar tenders because they're drunk," I told him. "Bar tenders get used to dealing with drunk people in crisis." I don't actually know if this is true--I haven't spent much time in bars, for obvious reasons. "I don't see the similarity to librarians."

"Don't you?" He asked me. "I'm a research librarian, not a circulation librarian. You guys mostly come talk to me because you have some homework assignment due and you have no idea how to find the information you need. That's not so different from a drunk in crisis."

Ok, then.

So, today I went in and sort of flopped down and the table in a dejected kind of way and Aaron came over and asked what was up.

"Ollie hasn't contacted me."

"Oh? Have you contacted him?"

"Not recently."

"Well, then."

"Yeah."

"Litha's coming up. Ask him to come visit for a few days."

"My bother and his wife and kid are coming."

"Yeah? So get Ollie to come, too."

He had a point.

"Aaron, you're Jewish, right?"

"You're pronouncing it wrong. I'm a Jewitch."

"Ok, I mean you were Jewish."

"I was a man of the book. Now I am a man of many books."

"You celebrate Pentecost, too, don't you?"

"Not especially."

"I mean there's a Jewish version."

"Yeah. Seven weeks after Passover. Pentecost is the Greek name for it. Fifty days. We call it Shavu'ot, or the Festival of Weeks."

"What's it about?"

"It's the first harvest festival and it commemorates the giving of the Torah."

"Like Lammas plus literature?"

"Something like that. So, what's yours about?"

"Pentecost?"

"Yeah."

"It's the birthday of the Church, the day when the Holy Spirit descended on the followers of Jesus."

"So it's the same thing--the beginning of the religion."

"Yeah, I guess so. Founders' Day." I hadn't thought of that before. "Hey, why doesn't the school have a Founders' Day?"

"We thought about it, but it didn't seem that important."

"We? Were you there?" I hadn't heard anything about Aaron's history.

"I was a candidate when we bought the campus. Two years later, just after I won my ring, they hired the non-teaching staff. There was a woman named Lara in the library for a while, but when she left they hired me."

"Why did she leave?"

"I don't know. A bunch of people did, though. They did a whole lot of volunteer work to get the school up and running and then when it was they decided they wanted to go do something else. Maybe they were afraid they'd stay forever?"

"How long have you been here, Aaron?"

"Seventeen years. I'll be here till I croak, I expect."

The scents of summer, grass, flowers, and animals, floated in through the open window and mixed with the scent of old books and clean wood. The dust still on my knuckles from working itched and I felt a tickle on the back of my neck, at my hairline. I reached back and pulled off a tick and watched it wave its eight legs in the air. It was at my mercy and I knew I was not going to kill it. I can shoot a deer if I have a good reason to do so, and I can eat her afterwards, but I cannot kill an animal simply for biting me. It would seem an unfair trade.

"I can understand that," I told Aaron.