Making the big decisions is the easiest part for me

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.