Stone Lake: part 56

A Star Tribune serialized novel by Richard Horberg

Chapter 19 continues

The story so far: Allen sparks class interest with intriguing quotes.

Bobby Anderson spoke up. "If a person is fully awake, it means that his eyes are like the high beam headlights on a car. If you look right into them, you might be blinded."

"Figuratively."

"Yes."

They had discussed the difference between figurative and literal language earlier in the week. "Can you give us some examples of people who might be fully awake — that is, fully alive?"

A whoop went up from the back of the room.

"Good answer. But you know what they say, Laura: love is blind. It can't see anything."

"Oh, that's right."

"But Laura is right," Johnny Fjerstad interrupted. "Love is blind means that if you're in love with someone you're blind to her faults. You think she's beautiful even if she's ugly. Like my sister."

More laughter.

Allen agreed. "Sharper, yes. When you're in love the trees are greener and the sky is bluer and the stars brighter than ever before. You feel as if you're really seeing things for the first time. A squirrel, for example, is never so beautiful as it is when you're in love." He paused. "Believe me, I speak from experience."

They laughed.

"Give us some more examples of people who are really alive."

"Jesus," Heidi Norton said. "And God. I bet we couldn't look them in the face."

"Okay. We'll admit Jesus and God. And saints and angels. Who else?"

"Perhaps, yes. Of course, some poets always have their nose buried in their rhyming dictionaries. Walt Whitman, like Thoreau, is an exception. Walt Whitman was more alive, more awake, than most of us. In many of his poems there are catalogs — line-by-line images of different kinds of people doing different things. He sees all of them at the same time. He loves all of them — young and old, good and bad, married and unmarried, healthy and sick. He's in love with everything at once, all at the same time."

He quoted a couple of lines from memory:

I am of the old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,

Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,

Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man….

"Next year, in American lit. Who else is fully awake?"

"Madmen," Bobby said. "You can't even look in their eyes."

"Oh, yes, madmen. Lunatics. You're absolutely right, Bobby. They're so alive they see too much. We wouldn't dare look in their eyes, would we?"

"Would Henry David Thoreau dare look in their eyes?"

"He'd probably write an essay about them instead."

"I liked it better when you brought the words," Heidi Norton said.

"But it's more useful if you find them."

The class filed out, the boys jostling each other playfully, the girls pausing to smile at him.

Allen told himself he owed a thousand thanks to C.P. Arndt for saving his life.

***

The day after the superintendent left, a student entered Allen's room in the middle of the hour and said that Mr. Palmer wanted all band members to come to the gym at once. Three people got up and left.

Half an hour later, the same student reappeared and said that Mr. Palmer asked all teachers to leave their classroom doors fully open for the rest of the day. Allen shrugged and opened the door.

Then it started — band music, muted at first as it rose from the basement, spiraling up the stairs, and then full blast as it came down the hall. A Sousa march, deafening in the enclosed space.

Allen went to the door. The class followed him, pushing past him, spilling out into the hall.

There was Jack Palmer at the head of the parade once more, resplendent in his green and white uniform, baton in hand, smiling broadly, cap on head, his eyes bright and shining. There was the young man with the glockenspiel — the trumpets, the clarinets, the flutes and the tubas, the majorettes spinning their batons toward the ceiling, and, last of all, the drums.

"I don't know."

"Why are they practicing in the halls?"

"I don't know that either."

When the band had passed, Allen called his students back in the room and, with a little difficulty, resumed the day's lesson. Ten minutes later, however, the music began again, rising from the stairwell, "The Stars and Stripes Forever" this time. At once, everybody surged out of the room into the hall, Allen with them.

Jack Palmer saluted them sharply, swung around and marched backwards some ten steps, raising his knees high. Across the way, Dave Meyers, surrounded by his history class, was smiling. Farther down the corridor, he saw Evelyn Wilson at the door of the library. She shrugged at him. He shrugged back.