The Refectory Manager

The refectory . . . A place to nourish the soul. A place to share the savory comestibles, the sweet confections, the salty condiments of the things that matter. A place to ruminate the cud of politics. A place to rant on the railings of religion. A place to arrange the flowers of sanguine beauty. A place to pause in the repose of shelter. Welcome, my friend. The Refectory Manager

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Location: College Place, Washington, United States

Friday, February 12, 2010

Engulfing

He had arrived in time for dinner.

The guests were simply aglow. Moving about. Patterns of motion within patterns of motion.

There was conversation. Hardly discernable though. Just enough to know that the chatter was indeed invigorating.

As one guest circulated one way, another would move in opposition. The coherent balance of the banquet hall remained static in the swirling pattern of circles.

One by one, a guest would quickly sneak a delicacy from the bounty of the smorgasbord. And in the attempted haste to be discrete, invariably made a splash.

The observer was entranced by the ritual of dinner unfolding before him.

Then, a hush fell over the dinner guests.

With some signal from the maître d', the choreography and conversation came to a hushed reprieve. Each guest took their respective place in the now silent refectory.

Each had eaten. Taken what they needed from the smorgasbord table. The delicacies themselves having previously gleaned from their own banquet table. The transfer of the immortality of life.

The light was fading. The guests were drifting away. To fly again. To eat yet another time.

The old weathered sign was emphatic.

“Beach closes at dusk.”

He turned to retrieve his rolled up socks.

There is something about trying to put socks back onto feet that are still wet from the sharing of a banquet table.

The sun had now fallen behind the sheltering cliff. But the old oak tree in the bottom of this little cove was stalwart in its persistence to reach for and grasp to the heavens for that last glimmer of light. The golden leaves in its crown, caught in the little eddies of wind, tethered by their stiff little petioles, swirling in little circles, shimmering, defiantly proclaiming their tenacity to the vanishing day.

His eyes dropped.

Something had moved.

And there they were.

A pair of daddy-long-legs.

Moseying along, side-by-side, together. On that still-warm November rock.

Then they stopped. Hesitated. And so carefully those elongated struts touched. Became intermingled. Sixteen legs of encirclement. And they cuddled. And nuzzled. Together. And what transpired was sacred.

In time, they slowly came apart.

Carefully. The un-circling. The un-mingling. The un-touching. Of sixteen legs.

There seemed a hesitation in their proceeding.

But then moseyed on, each in a separate way.

Dinner guests. Flying in the circles of the beauty of randomness. Cohesiveness. Each taking their turn in selecting the comestibles from the smorgasbord of a lake. Aquatic creatures, seeking the last vestiges of light at the close of the day, moving adjacent to the edge of that serving-platter, in the reassignment of their life.

The beak and talon of one. The life of another.

A circle. The proposal of death perpetuating the motion of life.

The harmonic circles of shimmering in golden leaves. Grasping for the circle of light.

The sphere of spider encuddlement.

A squabble of circling gulls.

Motion.

Circles of motion.

As Emerson* once said:

“The eye is the first circle;
the horizon which it forms is the second;
and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.”

Motion in circles.

Surrounding.

Engulfing.

*Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Circles."


The Refectory Manager

Thursday, February 04, 2010

It's the Room Where They Strap Ya!

That wall of paned windows. Observant windows. Two walls of blackboards. Shiny and so hard that the chalk wouldn't completely erase. The rack of creaky-old pull-down maps. A squeaky globe. Upright piano in the corner sequestering its spinning stool. Old worn-oak teacher's desk. Polished hand-bell. Cupboard in the back with a nest of nets and balls and bats. Some kind of a slate floor. The kind that really dulled his skates. And of course, pontificating high above the blackboard, that row of black-and-white hieroglyphics parading the properly formed upper and lower case elements of his pending learning.

And the desks. Rows of desks. Mounted on wooden strips. That homology in repetition of black metal side frames being straddled together by wooden tops, book shelves, seat backs and seats . . . some with pinchable cracks. The wooden tops embossed with initials. The infatuations of some united and entrapped forever within carved hearts. Inkwells with broken glass and dried up ink. The underneath of the book shelves encrusted with eons of fossilized stalactite gum. The little desks at the front. The metamorphosis. To the big ones in the back. Each desk a small personal asylum. Sometimes, the pokey of confinement.

Wax. Chalk dust. Old paper. That gagging dust-catcher spray on the dust mop that Old Mr. Miller swirled on the slate floor the night before. Essence of tuna escaping from a loosely wax-paper wrapped sandwich in a man-size lunchbox. Somebody's passed gas. The indelible smell of smells.

The ubiquitous big old school-house ticking wall-clock. The hour of nine. Teacher ringing the bell. All stand up. "Oh Canada, Our Home and Native Land . . ." Prayer. Muttered by the scared spitless kid occupying the desk behind the scared spitless kid who stumbled through yesterday's morning opening prayer. Arlene Harbus playing the piano. On the really cold days, with her gloves on. The request made for a favorite song. Inevitably, somebody would call out "Number 302." "Will There Be Any Stars, Any Stars in My Crown?" And the theological angst of that old "Gospel Melodies" songbook song would curdle the Ogilvie Oats in that kid's gut.

"Spot." "See Spot." "See Spot run."

The melding of sounds, pictures, symbols. Concepts. Ideas. Language. Communication.

Enraptured with fear in listening to the teacher read the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" to the big kids. Raptured with intrigue listening to the big kids read to him. Watching third graders learn cursive while he learned to mimic that parade of static alphabet glyphs. And to count. And to add. And to subtract. Not "take away." But "subtract." To tell time. Count money. Color within the lines.

Kids encircling the room for the spelling bee. Teacher looking up to see who is next. Looking down to find the right speller. Keep track of the last word used. The visible relief when getting it right. The chagrin when told to sit down.

Lunch. The metal box. Brown-bread egg-salad sandwich cut cross-wise instead of the diagonally-cut white bread ones like the neat kid's mother's did. That sickly-sweet odor of warm milk erupting from the wax-paper encased cork jammed into the neck of the squatty Thermos bottle. Dessert of a graham cracker sandwich glued together with Fry's Cocoa icing. After lunch and after the noon-hour game of "Prisoner's Base" on the field where the hockey rink would be in the winter, the highlight of the day. The room was quiet. It was story time. Sometimes kids would rest their head on the desk top. Sometimes form plastercene on the back of a scribbler into logs . . . then into cabins. Sometimes make designs on a blank piece of paper using crayons and a ruler. Sometimes just sit and stare. And listen. By then, the sun had moved in the sky. The observant windows were no longer flooded in morning light. It was easier to project to the vastness of outside. Of the future. Beyond those paned windows. Through their observant opaqueness into some imaginary realm of afternoon story.

The kid had agreed to go for only three days. And even that was one hell of a concession.

The teacher was Mr. Visger. Except the kid couldn't say is his name. No matter how hard he tried, it always came out as "Mr. Visiger." He spent that whole summer of 1951 trying to learn to say his name. Actually for him, Mr. Visger was really just "Dale." For Dale worked for that kid's father as an electrician that summer. Teacher and student were in frequent contact with each other.

But it was what happened at the supper table that convinced that kid he wanted no part in starting school. It was no joke for him at the time, even though his father laughed heartedly as he repeated it . . . supper after supper. A little wide-eyed kid believed him with the awe of God.

"Every kid gets the strap on the first day of school."

And on that day, he did get a lickin'.

'Cause he locked himself in the car for two hours and wouldn't get out.

But his father was wrong.

That first day was a registration day. Thirty kids in a one-room school. Somebody in each of the nine grades. Two in grade one. That kid. And Norman Fox who was taking it for the second time.

Mother and kid were dispatched in the afternoon to Osborne's Book Store down on 8th Avenue to fill the textbook and supply list.

But it was on that second morning. After the bowl of Sunny Boy Cereal, after the slicking of the hair, the cinching up of the breeches, the snapping of the pig-skin cap, the tablespoonful of gagging cod-liver oil, the little prayer of his mother recited in the back porch "Dear Jesus, please take care of little Kenny today, Amen," there was his resolute determination to render null and void that 3-day contract of going to school.

And if it hadn't been for a neighbor who physically picked him up and stuffed him into his car and took him there, he would still be waiting to start the 21 eventual years of formal learning.

After the nine o'clock bell ringing. After singing the Canadian National Anthem. After pledging allegiance to the King of England. After the morning prayer. The worship. The song.

There was the recitation of the rules. Already spelled out in block letters on the shiny old black board.

And a demonstration of not only what the strap looked like, but the fury of its sound as it was smacked on Mr. Visger's desk top.

A little five and a half year old boy made a solemn commitment, that for him at least, those observant windows would never ever see that room as the room where they strap ya!


The Refectory Manager

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