Beltane '09

The boy walked into class with a tie knotted around his neck. He dressed up to make his speech look better. Tommy was his name. He spoke haltingly, revealing shallow research and very little understanding.

He spoke about Voudun. Voodoo.

As he spoke his choppy, poorly cited sentences, there was something about him that spoke of awe as only a very young man can feel it. He was amazed and knew not what he beheld. It was endearing, bewitching in a naive, ingenuous sort of way. He was unassuming and between two shallow worlds as he lifted a small white board he had set down at his feet. He set it on the rail behind him for all to see.

I smiled a smirk, I shifted in my seat. The snake in my spine uncoiled restlessly and I tasted the classroom air with my tongue. My, my.

The boy called Tommy set a talisman behind him, an invocation. A prayer with no faith behind it has no power. But I knew two things: that the boy Tommy had drawn the charm with his own right hand, and that he had had a thrill in him while doing so. He believed, knowing not in what. He invoked, not knowing the names he called. A boy. Evohe. Dian y Glas in his most guileless guise.

When he was finished, he was upbraided by a bored teacher for poor scholarship. I waited until after class to seek him out.

I called his name three times and prairie blues eyes looked at me, gentle, mild. A boy's eyes, not a man. Scarcely an adult, and not at all in his heart, not yet. As filled with awe as a toddler, as trusting as a babe he listened to me. Winds, I told him. Storm and change. Oya and le Baron Samedi. Big-time pushy spirits. That invocation you're carrying, Tommy, is like a birthday party invitation, with a name and a time, asking someone to come. He seemed to understand.

That was a week ago. Today, wide eyed, he came to me. He pulled a chair in front of my desk, sitting split-legged and open. The world around us disintegrated and I tunneled on him. I pulled to me my mantle, my glamour, my full golden flower of ensorcellment. I don't know whats moved me to do such a thing outside of circle. I was priestess to him, using the allure of the space between the worlds. He ran his hands through his cornsilk hair. Told me his girlfriend abruptly switched her allegiances and that lust stalked him on the legs of new young women who came out of nowhere, following his clean American scent. He told me he felt the wind blowing through his bones and what was he supposed to do now?

A giggle like soft silken bubbles and I can count the beats in his smile before it comes. What to do? He's a child, he can't make the correct offerings of rum or a cigar. I give him an alternate idea, a way to thank the powers that be. He nods, eager and earnest. I would call him baby-witch if I were working as namer, but here I believe I will stand aside. I don't know what he will become.

***
All this was an afterthought to Beltane, which is my anniversary. My husband is so beautiful he makes me cry. He woke me on our day with kisses and the song that I walked down the aisle to become his wife. We spent the day alone, adventuring, reading each other stories, reflecting on where we have been, where we are, where we are going together. He is magnificent, and I am so lucky. A card from the Blues Brother informs us we are now permitted to advance to the next level. A gift from my sweet mother in law sweetens the whole day. A bottle of peach champagne from my mother recalls my bridal shower and I know I am happier now than the day I first tasted it. Lucky, lucky, lucky in love.

Summer is a comin' in...

Forget. Remember.

I'm back in school.

Three weeks ago, I was overjoyed at this. Possibilities opened wide before me and I fantasized about the homework I would have. Oh, the great things that might occur!

Now, as previously mentioned in my blog, I am grateful. I am so grateful that I live in a country where I am allowed and encouraged to pursue my education. I'm grateful that I can almost sort of afford to go to school. I'm grateful that my husband and family and friends fully support this idea.

I stopped going to school seven years ago. I dropped out of the community college where I was majoring in administration of justice and toying with literature and French. I left the country, came home, and got a job. I started a long stint of wasting my youth and teaching myself things from books and Teh Intertubes. Somehow in that seven years, I forgot a lot of things.

I forgot how tiresome it is to be lectured for six weeks on something I could have picked up in eight hours. I forgot how grating it is to have an instructor who posesses neither feeling nor flair for the subject he teaches. I forgot how I used to lose myself in any bit of minutiae in the classroom in my boredom. (Holes in the ceiling tiles, ripples in the carpet.) I forgot how much I appreciated art on the walls of the the classroom to give me something to think about and still look studious. I forgot how unapologetically, vocally ignorant many of my fellow students were and still are. I forgot that my generation forgot how to read, and subsequent generations are out to make us look like ravenous bibliophiles. I forgot that I have not really learned anything new from any teacher since I was 12.*

So, what's different now? Now I'm too old to screw around. That's the long nd the short of it at this point. I'm not 18. I can't give up and fly to Europe and dismiss the idea of ever having a degree. No matter how dull these next few years prove to be, I have to slog through it. I have to do well and in many cases feign interest in order to do well.I have to bide my time, pay my dues, and play the game.

Funny that; in high school those exact phrases made me screech about the purity of the auto-didact and the corruption and bias of the system.

Now, it fills me with a sense of grim, determined dread. I'm back in school.

Now I remember.



*Rich Herold, my art history teacher in 1999-2000 is the notable exception to this rule. I learned more in his class than I ever picked up on my own. His was my favorite class in all of high school and since.