Aram's original question was how I lead my
life, I guess my answer is that I trust my gut. Or, I leap before I look. Or, I just try to have some fun. But mainly, I trust my gut more than conventional wisdom. Lama Marut says you have to be a rebel to be on a spiritual path. I think of some of the great rebels like Christ, like Gandhi. I ain't no Gandhi, as we all understand, but I am interested in following the question of how I have made some of the bigger steps in my life.
My decision to go to boarding school
happened one day in ninth grade. I had been kicked out of school in
eighth grade and had a harsh summer of taking Latin classes and
tennis lessons. In seventh and eighth grade we had this gang we
called the Pig Club. (NO memory of why.) We hung out constantly and
had a great time, but we were starting to get restless and I was
starting to show off a bit. (To be a 'show off' was my Dad's worst
insult) We had this Latin teacher whom I had designated as “The
Dumbest Person in the World”. One day we were having a test that
was so easy it was a joke. So I alerted the club that I was going to
prove she was too stupid to teach. I sat in the front row and when
the test started I ripped the page with the answers out of my book (a
grave sin in public schools) and put it under my test paper and
traced the answers making sure that everyone saw me. Well, I guess
she wasn't so very dumb or at least not blind I was expelled from
school and had to make up the Latin course I flunked in summer
school.
So the start of ninth grade I was on my
best behavior and some of the Pig Club members had gone off to
Catholic or private schools. I did OK on the straight and narrow
until one day in the spring when my mother and I had gone to the
store and bought me a new bathing suit. I came home to the same
sameness and, of course, called my girlfriends and described the
bathing suit and they all were very excited and then I had a snack
and then I had an inner freak out. I saw myself doing exactly the
same thing day after day for four more years. Having the same
conversations and the same friends and the same dumb snacks and I couldn't face it.
My brother Bill was already away at
school. I didn't know anything about anything but Mom had gone to
Dana Hall and there were alumnae bulletins lying around and I had
glanced at them and noticed a lot of foreign girls. That night at
dinner I told my parents that I was going to Dana Hall next year.
They said, “Well you had better apply.” I don't remember filling
out an application, but one day I was going into gym class at school
and the guidance counselor came and told me I had to go to the office
and take an admissions test for Dana.
It was the first time I had seen a blue
book and the first essay test I had encountered.
As fate would have it I had just the
night before finished reading Wuthering Heights and the essay
question was to discuss a character in a book I had read who...blah
blah blah ..and I was off to the races. No teacher had ever asked for
my interpretation of something I had read. I loved and aced the test.
That was how I got to boarding school. That is kind of still my modus
operandi. I get the inner shift and then leap.
Our chaplain was Dr. Howard Thurman. For the first time, I looked
forward to going to chapel on Sunday nights. Previous to Dr. Thurman
chapel was the bottom activity of the week. We had to put on chapel
garb (pearls, stockings, heels) and sit in a candlelit rather cramped
space and sang durgy Protestant hymns and get super homesick but most
of all worry about the tests and papers and homework that we should
have been working on all weekend.
My friends, the Pig Club didn't
resonate with Dr. Thurman the way I did. He moved me to think deeper.
Now, this wasn't the Pig Club of jr. high fame. This was called The
Second Benevolent Order of Pigs International. Yes, I was interested
in the history of the Labor Movement, although it was not taught at
prestigious East Coast prep schools at that time. We were a small
subculture, well, exclusive society with several discrete purposes.
We were also a hidden organization. That was part of the fun. Our
first objective was regarding getting our just desserts.
The dining hall was very formal. We had
to 'dress for dinner'. Uniforms during the day, nice clothes at
dinner, semi-formal gear on Friday nights. We had assigned tables
with a 'Mistress' at each one. French table every month for a week.
Conversation was required to be bright and inclusive. The maids in
their uniforms served us food bringing the service to each of us.
Food is a generous word. The stuff was made to be painful as was the
old English tradition. Liver and onions, canned spinach, shit on a
shingle,(I hope you never had to have creamed beef with flour and
water gravy on white toast.) We did. But there were three stellar
offerings: great chocolate chip cookies, fabulous S..S. Pearce ice
cream (peppermint to die for) and Sunday AM popovers with gobs of
butter and great orange marmalade.
The great trays of these goodies were
cleared away as the meal ended. We formed an alliance and met after
meals and put a maid and a Guatemalan kitchen boy on our payroll and
convened after the mistresses had departed and pigged out in a
fiercely competitive manner. We also started to pull stunts in or
mild mannered guerrilla warfare with the stuffy traditions of the
school
There was a very formal reception area
called appropriately the Oak Room. It was like the lounge room at the
Harvard Club in New York only instead of portraits of former
presidents of America, it had great ugly portraits of past
headmistresses of Dana. Over the great fireplace was Helen Temple
Cooke, our founder. In the center of the room was a highly polished
giant round oak table. In the center of that was a bronze statue of a
horse. One of our self appointed tasks concerned this set up. Getting
out of our rooms at night was not easy, but for most of the year,
rotating the job among us, we went to the Oak Room and rotated the
horse so that its rear was facing the founder's portrait and stuck a
cigarette on her mouth using a piece of chewing gum.
For many assemblies we had to sit with
the whole school and hear the Head Mistress threaten and cajole the
student body to come clean about who the perps were. It never
happened.
Our nocturnal adventures culminated in
a thespian adventure. Getting out at night was a real thrill. We
decided to write and perform a play. We called the play “A Day at
the Beach”. I don't remember any of my lines, surely I had many,
but the thrill of the play was that we did it in the Wellesley
College auditorium in the middle of the night, in the dark. The
College was a few miles away and highly secure, so this involved
getting out of our dorms undetected, walking the mile or two,
breaking into Wellesley carrying all our props and costumes and doing
the play for no one in the dark. We did it, leaving the sand we had
carried covering a lot of the stage. Of course we couldn't tell
anyone, but collectively we felt a great sense of achievement and
satisfaction.
We also were very intellectual. Mas manana.
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