Part 1: Post 2: Arrival

I found something today, and I don't know what it is or what it means.

 I was driving around in the mountains, trying to think of how to tell my folks I'd quit school, when I passed a long driveway with a small, blue sign. 

Curiosity tugged at me. Then I passed a second driveway and sign, evidently a second entrance to whatever it was. Curiosity tugged harder. I didn't have anything else to do, so I turned my car around and drove in. I didn't read the sign.

The grounds of the campus I drove onto looked very vaguely collegiate, and I saw several groups of people walking through the snow. Mostly, they looked to be about my age, some older, both men and women. The thing is, a lot of them wore hooded, black capes. They looked...like Hogwarts students, something from Harry Potter. They all ignored me, except to step out of the way of the car. One of the buildings had a car port in front and a formal-looking entryway, so that is where I went. I can't begin to explain what I was doing or why I was doing it. I'm kind of in between things right now and, well, why not. The slate steps were icy but well sanded and the door had weight when I opened it. It seemed real.

The office inside was warm and smelled like wet wool and melted snow. There was a large desk, and a woman behind it looking at me, and all sorts of knickknacks around, little statues and hangings and what-not. The woman--she was slim and kind of ageless-looking, like you'd want to call her ma'am but you couldn't be sure she wouldn't take offense. She was wearing an electric blue top, I don't know why I remember that. When she asked can I help you? I simply opened my mouth and said the first thing that came to my head;

"What is this place? Some kind of pagan seminary?"

I'm not usually that abrupt with strangers, but her eyes twinkled and she smiled at me.

"That's exactly what it is," she told me. I was stunned. What does "pagan seminary" even mean? I had some Wiccan friends in high school, so I know a little, but it's not really my thing. On a whim, I asked how to apply. The woman asked if I wanted to attend the school. I said I did, which was suddenly quite true. I want to have something to tell my parents besides that I quit school so I wouldn't fail it. I want some sort of plan B. And I want to belong to this strange place where people wear Harry Potter robes to class.

The woman smiled and said I'd just been accepted and that new student orientation begins in two days.

"Hold on," I told her, "two days? What am I going to tell my parents? How am I going to pay for this? What is this place?" I mean, I normally do things on a whim, but I like to research the whim some before I jump into it. I like to know where I'm going. She smiled and handed me a pamphlet and told me to sit on a couch and read it and come back with any more questions.


And while I was sitting there, the oddest thing happened. Other people started coming in, just like I had. I think four of them at least, all having some version of the same conversation I'd had. Mostly I was reading my pamphlet when the others came it, but one girl caught my attention because she looked so young. Her hair was half purple and badly cut and she was in the middle of some argument with her mother, who called her Nora.  I didn't mean to evesdrop, but I listened anyway. I do that a lot.

"But she's sixteen!"the mother said to the woman in electric blue, "she has to finish high school!"

"Oh, and does Nora like school?" the receptionist asked, brightly. "Does she get good grades?"

And the mother just drooped. Her words fell out like pillows from an overstuffed closet. It was like she was making a confession. She told the receptionist all about Nora's failing grades ("and she's such a bright girl!"), her late nights, her sleazy boyfriends...Nora saw me looking at her and we locked eyes for a moment. I smiled sympathetically and she half-smiled back and rolled her eyes.  In the end they worked out some kind of deal. I think Nora is starting school here, too, but she's going to have to complete some sort of adapted curriculum and go home every weekend.

The next one caught my attention because he was old. Old-er, anyway. His hair is all grey. He came in, looked around carefully, and said "this is a pagan seminary, right? Non-denominational?"

The receptionist seemed a little surprised and asked him how he knew. At that moment, I am not even kidding, two people wearing black robes walked out from a door behind the desk, talking to each other about whether it was better to take magic with Allen or with Kit. The latter, apparently, gives more homework. When they saw us in the office, the two people excused themselves and walked out through the front door.

 "You mean aside from that?" asked the grey-haired man.

"Yes, aside from that," said the receptionist, trying very hard not to laugh.

"It takes one to know one," the man said. "I've been a Wiccan priest for forty-five years. My wife and I were in a coven for twenty. You've got signs up all over the place for anyone with eyes to see. I'll get to the point; how do I apply?"

"You just did--as a student,"the receptionist said. "We don't hire outside faculty." When the man assured her that was alright, she asked him why he wanted to be a student.

"Beginner's mind?"he suggested, then grew quieter and explained that his wife had died less than a year ago and he didn't want to be alone. "And I'm not ready for one of those damn nursing homes."

He got a pamphlet, too, and some sympathetic words, and joined me on the couch. I asked him what signs he was talking about and he pointed out the symbolism of some of the knickknacks. His name is Arther.

I gather that all students come this way, they just walk in, and if they guess what the school is and say they want to enroll, they are admitted. From what the woman in blue--her name is Sharon--told me, they trickle in over the year, but most show up in the last couple of weeks before orientation. They start the school year in February, not September here. I guess it's an entrance test--you have to be intuitive enough to find the school--and I passed!

 Look, I'm not as flighty as all of this makes me sound. This is really fast, but I've read the pamphlet and asked questions, and I actually know almost as much about this place as I did about my old school when I started. No matter what else it is, this place is a fully accredited liberal arts college.  I don't have to take on any more debt to go here, and I can pay as I go so if I decide I don't like it I can leave without really losing anything. I'll think about it for a few more days so I can be sure.

But I've got a good feeling about this.

Part 1: Post 1: Beginning Again

Of course, the school had a name, but none of us ever used it.

We didn't talk about the school much to outsiders, and among ourselves we could always just call it "the school," and we'd know what was meant. My degree does say something at the top, where names usually go, but to be honest that was the first place I ever saw that name. How did I not ever ask for a name of my school? You have to understand that there was always something mysterious about the place, and that was by design. There was a lot we never knew, strange secrets and useful secrets as well as a genuine respect for privacy. Direct questions always received honest answers, and we got good at asking the important questions, but we also learned to let the rest be.

The school is gone now, but we keep the secrets still, keep them for practical reasons and also we keep the secrets the way you might bank a fire against the winter chill. I have been asked to share certain things with you, to make public certain aspects of our way. I will keep silent on anything that would allow you to track down the exact location of our campus or the true identity of any of our staff and students. I will not tell you the name, though as I said, we never used it, anyway, and I will change certain identifying details. But all the important things I am about to tell you are true.


I attempted this blog last year, but it never came out quite the way I wanted. I am trying again. This time, with the exception of this first post and certain notes I will set off in brackets, I will write as though I am blogging about my current life. I will try to recapture the viewpoint I had thirteen years ago, when all this was new to me. I'll let you find out about the school and its people as I did, a little at a time. I hope that you will come to feel it is your school as well, at least in some small way.

My name is Daniel.


I joined the school in February of 2000, the New Year and the shame of having flunked out of my freshman year of college both still fresh in my mind. I was nineteen years old, and I was a young nineteen in some ways. I never thought I would fail college; I'd always been bright, gotten good grades, but somehow when I got to college I couldn't apply myself. It didn't feel like what I was supposed to be doing. In retrospect, my refusal to participate sounds bravely intuitive, but at the time it felt like my life was being hijacked by...something I couldn't understand.

I had not quite been expelled, but I knew I would be if things continued, and I knew of no way to keep things from continuing. Looking back on it, I was profoundly, existentially bored. I'd lived my whole life just going through the motions. Most things came easily to me, but I felt like I was waiting for my life to start. My life still had not started, not even at college, and I think I knew that if I kept living as I had been, getting good grades and doing what I was supposed to do, I would die like that. But I didn't know what else to do. I'd made the decision to quit school, though I hadn't yet finalized my withdrawal and I had not told my parents.

And so the end of January found me driving around in the mountains pretending to get ready for the next semester. Classes were supposed to have started already, but I had not registered for any. I had no idea whatever of what I was going to do. The bare trees looked quiet and restful out my car windows and the trees and hills and little clumps of houses soothed me somehow. The slight effort of paying attention to the road and the beautiful countryside kept me from having to think. The snow looked like lemon sugar in the bright sunshine.

And beneath a clump of tall trees I saw a sign and a driveway that piqued my curiosity and changed my life.

Completed Cycle

Hello, all,

This is the last update I will post until the story restarts in about two weeks. I want to talk some about why I'm restarting and what you will find here once I do restart. And then I will tell you about New Years twelve years ago.

When I started this blog, I wanted it to seem like I was blogging about my current life--of course, these events happened over a decade ago, and I intended to be honest about that, but I wanted readers to be able to get into the story as though it were happening right now. Unfortunately, I got caught up in a lot of exposition early on, so I ended up doing a lot of telling and very little showing.

This time, when I restart the story, you are not going to get a simple re-run. Some of the posts will include old material, but I'm going to post much more often (roughly twice a week), so there will be a lot of new materials. I will describe some of my fellow students as well as the faculty, so you'll get to know more characters. I'm hoping to include illustrations with every post (I can paint and draw), and I'll include links to supplemental material, so if you want to you can look up Charlie's entire recommended reading list or Kit's lecture notes or complete menus for our holiday meals.

Yes, it will be the same "story" that you have read before, but there will be a lot more of it. More detail, more characters, and a more immediate sense of being part of the day-to-day flow of the story.

So, for New Years' itself, a few of us on campus toasted the new year in and watched the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." We couldn't watch the ball drop, because we didn't have TV on campus, but we did have a video player. I remember standing out on one of the balconies looking out at the dark and suddenly I could hear distant cheering and fireworks bloom in the night around me as people in the nearby towns and along the roads began to celebrate. I wasn't wearing a watch; the New Year for me was auditory, in the beginning. Behind me in the room I heard voices, so I turned and joined my friends.

I don't know what the masters did. I didn't see any of them.

For the next few weeks my busy, semi-solitary, winter vacation continued. Sometime I saw strangers dressed in street clothes in campus, looking around, curious. I didn't speak to any of them, but I knew what they were doing. Sometimes I walked through the office and saw people talking to Sharon. I saw myself through the eyes of these prospective students and I looked strange and exotic in my black and white robes. I looked like what they wanted to be. At the same time, I felt normal, every day. My life had changed so much in just a year. I had changed.

Again, the masters processed into Chapel Hall and we gave them light so they could light the way for us. Graduates crossed the stage and a few more people received their green rings. The school year quickened into life again, and my time as a yearling was over.

A new cycle was beginning.

Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yule

Happy Yule!

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

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

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

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

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

And heard music.

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

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

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

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

Happy Yule, everyone.

The Busiest Winter Vacation Ever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turkeys

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

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

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

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