The Storming of the Cafeteria

He was a new teacher in his present school, but he had come from a very wealthy boarding school. Through a series of innocuous circumstances, he'd had to move jobs. To his disappointment, he found himself in a public school with students who were below the standards he was used to, both academically and in terms of social status. He didn't mind the diversity...it's just that some of those kids were just not "fully civilized" as he'd said to his wife over dinner.

The first time he sat down for lunch in his new school, he was disgusted. He was used to real cooking. This food wasn’t fit for second-place State Fair pig, let alone human children and adults. But the lunch was free, so he picked around and tried to eat only the least horrible of horribles each day; each day walking the halls back to his classroom muttering things like “garbage heap” and “no respect" and “a starving pit bull would turn away from…”

One day, after having gagged his way through the worst of the meals so far, he came back from lunch in a rage. (His salad had actually been slimy...and, was that a gnat? He shuddered.) 

He glared, from under lowered eyebrows, at his students, who became afraid. What had they done? What was in store for them? They all liked him this new guy. He was “cool.” He never gave homework. He even cursed a little in class and had once let the “F-bomb” fly. They didn’t want him to be mad at them.

Then, he poured forth his feelings: For a full class period, forty-four minutes, he railed against the horrible quality of the cafeteria food. For the tax dollars the parents were paying, he argued, they should at least get to eat like human beings.

"If I were you," he said, "I would not accept this slop for another day! Why,” he pointed out, “should you get soggy fries and pink-slime hamburgers day after day? What does the administration take you for, fools? The principal is an idiot, the vice-principal is lazy and the whole administrative staff are dimwits. I also heard that they don't refrigerate their meat properly and that they keep sandwiches out over the weekend and serve them to us on Monday! Several teachers have said so. When you get down to lunch today, you need to make them change their ways! You are not idots. You are pigs at the trough! You've been brushed aside just so they can save a little money! Stand up for yourselves!"

"YEAH!" the kids responded. "YEAAAAH!!!" Fists were raised in the air; violent high-fives were given. The teacher's chest puffed out. 

They started stomping on the floor and chanting "No-more-slop! NO-MORE-SLOP!"

The bell rang, and they spewed out of the classroom door like white water from the dam, chanting. 

The supervisors in the hall were powerless to stop them or to calm them down.

In his classroom, our teacher opened a Thermos and poured out a good, strong cup of coffee, from home, sipped, sighing at the warmth and deliciousness.

When the kids breached the dining hall, they siezed the warming trays and dumped food on the floor. They whacked one of the lunch ladies on the temple with a big, metal spoon. Two boys urinated in the mashed potatoes. They toppled tables and spit on the lunchroom supervisors whom they'd forced into corners, all the while chanting: “NO-MORE-SLOP!”

When called to task by the school's administration, the teacher said: "I didn't tell them to do trash anything. I didn't say one word about destruction or violence. All I did was mention that the food here should be better. It was probably that Roderiguez kid who talked them all into it. He is a problem, that kid."

All of the kids involved were punished, thank goodness, for their monstrous behavior.

The teacher started bringing his lunch to school after that: delicious sandwiches made at a local gourmet delicatessen.

The Mirror (A Parable)

He simply walked past the parked car. His elbow brushed the side mirror...

He really didn't even notice. Somewhere in the back of his mind, it registered, but, he was wrapped up in the tangled twine of daily thoughts. It never occurred to him to go back and readjust the thing.

He'd knocked the mirror forward, two inches.

Later, during the morning rush, she didn't see the car coming up on her right, because her mirror was not set properly. In a held breath or two, her car was pushed off of the road and up a grass bank.

She spent her night in the ER, being tested and checked and frowned at with concern by strangers in scrubs. She'd be out of work for a week.

He spent his night watching basketball on TV and eating take-out wings.

This Is (Probably Not) about You

He was tough. He was clever. He fought for what was right, because all that is necessary for evil to flourish is for good people like him sit by and do nothing about it. (It never occurred to him that he might be wrong about something; urgency dictated that he needed to act.)

The thing that made him most proud was that he was good with words. His speaking and writing had layers. He could craft speeches and memos to sound as if he were being munificent and selfless, even while he was drawing attention to his own exceptional performances in professional and social circles.

He rarely ate lunch and he never ate at company parties, which made his co-workers wonder why he was so plump. This was another one of his clever moves. He was a player of chess who spoke of avoiding french fries while others indulged and then he stopped on the way home for various confections. Some speculated he had glandular issues. This was preferable.

He knew every motivational and aphoristic cliche ever written. So had his father. He would never go behind his father's sayings, because the wisdom was indisputable.  Timeless. Traditional.

The Man and the Bird (A Riddle-Parable)

Dig...

The bird flies. The man walks.

The man sees the bird fly; he dreams of flight.

The bird flies and thinks nothing of it, because it is what he does. It is, to him, as walking is to the man.

If the man could fly, he would soon think nothing of it.

The difference: the bird just goes on being a bird, with no disappointment and no regret.The man laments his loss of wonder and begins searching for something higher than flight.

The bird dies a bird. The man dies a man. One of them missed the point.

Which one was it?

The Tale of Ned and Honey (A Parable)

Once upon a time (okay, it was last Friday) a guy named Ned was clicking around on the Internet and he saw a picture of a tattoo: it was a snake (a cobra, to be precise) and the cobra was wearing a cap emblazoned with the logo of his favorite football team.

I deeply desire that tattoo, thought Ned. Alas, he thought, further -- my wife dislikes tattoos deeply.

"Honey," he said, flipping around his iPad. "Look at this. Isn't it cool?"

Honey (seriously, that was her name) dropped her reading glasses down low on her nose and glanced over from her chair. "Eeeewuh. Gross. And, besides, you know I dislike tattoos deeply."

Ned was vexed. He'd always loved tattoos. His cousin, Ted, had had a great one: an image of Curly, from the Three Stooges, smoking a marijuana cigarette. Ned had always coveted it.

He was further vexed because marriage had taken away his freedom. His freedom, do you hear? Who was she to tell him what to do?

The Distant Ones (A Parable)

When the Traveler returned from his journey to the future, he staggered into the room, unshaven, exhausted. His clothing was rumpled and his skin was pale. My first instinct was to somehow discern, by the twitching in the corners of his mouth or from the removed look in his eyes or from the slight quivering of his hand as he filled his glass with port wine, what it might have been that he had endured.

His expression was not one of frantic horror, but of a frozen kind of terror; better still, it was one born of a draining fear that had depleted him of the ability to scream out. He was an emptied vessel. He was a ship under shredded sails.

I let him sit back in his chair and drain his glass and then another. It wouldn't do to force him to talk. He would need to come to it on his own. What idea could I have as to the trials he had endured on his journey into the distant future? What monsters had he seen? What horrors of human evolution had he witnessed? Maniacal genocides? Rampant oppression?

We sat, without speaking, amidst the clicking din of the numerous clocks in his parlour. As he sat, his forehead balanced on his right hand, a third glass of port dangled from his left, tilted to the brink of spilling. I tried to let my gaze fall on anything other than him, so as not to pressure him into speech. I surveyed the handsomely bound books that lined the room; the guttering oil lamps that sent delicate ribbons of black smoke into the shadows on the ceiling and set the red wood of the desk aglow; the clutter of notes, drawings and papers thereon; the arabesque Indian patterns in the carpet below my shoes; the fine Havana between my fingers...

C&D Bike Repair (A Memoir Parable)

On a sprawlingly long, deliciously cool summer day, when I was about eleven or twelve, my friend Dave and I decided to put in some hard work. We were going to open a bike repair shop.

We dug in to the work, clearing out and organizing my parent's aluminum storage shed in the back yard. We put things where they belonged and hung things on pegs. We swept. We gathered up the available tools (not that many were around in the home of a trumpet player/arranger, but we made-do) and put them on a shelf, neatly lined up. If I'm not mistaken, we polished them with our breath and a rag, too.

When we were finished organizing, we examined the fruits of our labor -- must have been five-hours' work -- with fists on evaluative hips. I remember bending to pick up a small piece of dried leaf from the concrete floor. It wouldn't do to have the alabaster interrupted by some deciduous intruder, after all we'd done.

We looked at each other. What was next? We snapped our fingers: the sign.

We walked to the nearest store and purchased poster board with the change I kept in my room in a nine-inch high, toy Mosler safe (with a real combination lock). We gathered up markers and paints and pencils and rulers. I, having already been recognized as the neighborhood bohemian (despite my modestly impressive talents as a third baseman) was given the task of creating the sign. Dave reclined in the shade of our walnut tree, a blade of grass between his teeth, as I set to work. Eventually, he fell asleep, no doubt dreaming of the wealth we would accrue as bicycle repair moguls.

The Conquest of Ignorance (A Parable)

The majestic ship, Understanding, left the port of Then. Her flags flew high and bright, snapping crisp, aloft. Her prow pointed true and straight and the Infinite Captains steered her in whatever directions they fancied, on a quest for facts and knowledge.

Understanding trekked the dark sea, foam exploding, impossibly white in the sun, around her great, timber breast; sails full-bellied but always hungry for more speed and for greater distance, driving onward, arrow-focused on her destination. 

After much time had passed, she reached the shore of Now. A captain stood up and proudly announced to all who could hear: We have arrived!

There were cheers everywhere. There was pride as thick as peanut butter gooping up in the throats of everyone alive. 

Understanding was quickly tied to the dock and made into a museum, with a restaurant and a gift shop and restrooms with baby-changing stations.

John Tanner and William Tanner (A Parable)

On a still-dark Sunday morning in the Middle Ages, John Tanner awoke to the shriek of the rooster. He rose in darkness, just as he had gone to sleep in darkness. It was cold; his breath floated in a cloud as he leaned to stoke the fire. One of his children (the only one who had survived three of these winters in this same one-room hovel) coughed a wet cough. He'd been coughing like this for nearly a month, and John and his wife were beginning to be concerned. The boy was sleeping away days, now.

Konrad Witz: St. Chritopher

John had become used to the stench of his work, but that same stench meant that his house was far away from the others in the village. Most days were isolation and work and close contact with the urine that was used in his trade. Most days, he woke in the dark, worked through the light, and went to bed. His life was work and darkness. Except on Sunday...

The Master Thespian (A Parable)

He'd prepared for this all of his life. He'd studied The Method. He'd read The Bard at bed time each night since the age of nine. He'd glowed in front of the footlights while still in diapers. He'd become a master of his craft.

Then, it happened...

He was given his dream role in the greatest play in the history of the world. It was to run for six months on Broadway -- longer, perhaps. The show was guided by the most successful director of all time. He would live his dream; there would be a movie offer; he would make a fortune.

But, after the first rehearsal, he realized this all meant nothing. His love interest -- the other lead -- was the worst actress he had ever met. Their kisses were like organizing the silverware. Their scenes of jealous passion were exciting as oatmeal.

She was the worst actress ever born. She was also the producer's daughter.

Performance after performance was like playing a one-man tennis match. Still, he served and served again, only to watch the ball hit the back wall and die after a few bounces, fuzzy and nauseous green in the shadows.

This would be hilarious if it were not a terrifying truth of so many lives.

Gareth the Builder (A Parable)

A young man with wide and deep eyes came out of the forest with only a pack on his back and a long stick as a walking staff. He looked with his wide, deep eyes, upon an expansive plain of grass that moved like green ocean waves. His name was Gareth.

Gareth dropped his pack and sat, looking at the open plain. He made a square with his fingers and looked through it at the plain. Whispering to himself, he took out a small book and began to write things in it. He drew furious pictures of towers and walls rising to the sky where they would, someday, scratch the bellies of the clouds.

For weeks, he thought and wrote and walked around the open plain, imagining and planning. Sometimes, he would lie for hours in the grass, watching the clouds that he dreamed one day to touch with his fingers, standing atop a great tower that he built.

Years passed. Gareth would leave for months and then return with many workers and with great machines criss-crossed by ropes and pulleys and levers. Great wagons pulled by teams of sweaty war horses would bring supplies.

The Root of Civilization (A Parable)

Kwai Chang Caine ("Grasshopper") and
Master Po, from Kung Fu

Two boys, ten years old, clad in crisp white and bound about the waist with red belts, bowed and stepped on to the floor of their karate school's floor.

They joined their fellow students to stretch muscles and warm up with kicks and punches at the air.

When their instructor arrived, he lead them in calisthenics, then settled them down into kneeling position -- backs straight, eyes closed (most of them), and the boys meditated to the music of orient that gently wafted into the room from hidden speakers.

The Ladder of Light (A Parable)

Ansel Adams: "Clouds, Sierra Nevada."

The old man fell asleep in his chair. He died.

He only knew that he died because when he sat up, bleary, everything around him had turned to foggy shapes. From his upraised hands extended, upward, a ladder wrought of light.

He began to climb, with no effort, feeling the way he had as a boy when he had lifted his smiling father in the pool, amazed at his own strength in the water.

It was like being a weightless astronaut. He could climb forever, without effort. With no muscles to tire, with no heart to race, with no brow to sweat, "effort" was a word with no definition.

He climbed and climbed until he reached a platform of mist where some others had stopped climbing. There, near his ladder, hovered a guardian spirit, as bright as a solar flare and as dark as anesthetic sleep. Without speaking, it said, Go. Climb. And the soundless tone of those words made him feel as happy as a cuddled dog.

The Great Competitor: A Parable

The Great Competitor is born. He's a dim-eyed baby with a lackluster cry and no taste for the breast.

He becomes a boy, a little weakened by store-bought formula. Because he feels weak, he fights hard to look strong. He tells other boys how strong he is. He pushes better boys in hallways and he plays playground kickball as if his life is threatened by second place. (Because it is.)

He becomes a teen, which is when he wraps his weaknesses around him like a protective coat. He tortures his teachers, who are in it only for him. (He will brag about this into adulthood, because he won't have come far enough to be ashamed.) He goes on weekend quests for disorientation and disoriented sex -- girls he can use to add sex muscles to his beer muscles; to his soul's muscles. He fights, too. He hurts to feel better; he forces himself into others with his body, because he can't get into their hearts. He wins. He always wins.

Fairy's Tale (A Parable)

There was a mist, teeming with the sparkled flakes that were the Essence of Faerie, and it shone around them all and rippled away gently as they moved, those Creatures of Grace, whose voices rang multi-layered, like chords in a madrigal; whose eyes both reflected and were composed of the glimmer that spun everywhere. Mother and Father hovered by the roof-door and smiled down.

"Be good, small ones."

Zeema and Zoarenth smiled the smiles that contained all of the the pure and innocent evil of their kind, their faces aswirl with pink and white meldings.

"And, Chenthah: no scary stories," they said to the young Fairy who would watch the younger ones for the night.

"I promise," Chenthah said, the sign hidden behind her back, her face's colors shifting between blue and pink.

When the roof-door was closed and the glow of the glowbug lamps took up the toil that the moonlight had done when it had been opened, the children fell into Chenthah's lap and cuddled close. Their skin soon matched the leaves that roofed the house: deep green.

"Tell us the story, Chenthah," they said. "Tell us the stories of the Stoneworld!"

Chenthah, knowing full well that she would tell it, demurred -- her green eyes narrow and her skin going to the color of a luminescent Caribbean night-wave. "I promised..."

The Great Teacher (A Parable)

The school was a great, open field. The Great Teacher watched from the sunlit hill.

Three teachers stood before his class, next to a great stack of bricks -- special bricks, that were called "facts."

The first teacher picked up a fact-brick and held it out. One at time, the students approached and took the offering from his hands. When each student was supplied, the teacher commanded: "Now, keep returning to me and put your bricks in a stack. You will make the biggest pile possible, for I will hand you many, many bricks before the sun falls."

The Great Teacher frowned.

Jarvis and the Cage (A Parable)

There once was a little black-and-white rabbit. He was quite a rabbit, but a rabbit nonetheless, and this meant that he was jerky and twitchy and had a fuzzy coat that left floating, white puffs in the air behind him when he darted off in one direction or another.

One day, he was bought by a young couple who decided to treat him like a companion and not as a caged curiosity. They taught him to relieve himself in his cage and not in the living room. The young man made a carpeted ramp so that Jarvis could get in and out of his cage easily. The cage was roomy and multi-leveled, so that Jarvis could have a few places in which to lie down and a vista to sit upon and from which he could observe the outside world (the living room).

The Gardener and His Wife (A Parable)

The old man bent, sadly, over the two vegetable plants. One was dead and the other had grown fat, strong and tall. He rubbed his chin with a thumb and forefinger.

"I don't understand," he said to his wife, who stood behind him. "I raised them just the same. I fed them the same food. I kept them in the same sunny garden patch. I pulled away their dead leaves and talked to them each day."

Birds chirped and a wind moved the green trees.

"Are they the same?" said the old woman.

"No," said the old man. "They are two slightly different vegetables."

"Then, perhaps," she said, "what was nurturing to one was cruelty the another."

The Cleansing (A Mystery Parable)

For years, the factory workers complained about many things: their pay; the working conditions; the hours. Their complaints were just. The owners were beasts. The workers were treated brutally. The situation was bad. Something needed to be done.

Finally, a reporter came, disguised in the overalls of one of the many workers, to expose the story. One of the workers, who was without fear, showed the reporter around the factory.

"And look!" said the fearless worker at the end of the tour. "Look at the bathrooms! I cannot stand it any more, I tell you."

Three Houses (A Parable)

It was late on a Saturday morning. Three houses stood on a street, one next to the other, in a quiet suburban town. 

One house was perfect. The shingles were tight and new. The bushes were smooth and round. The lawn glowed emerald, like a square carved from a Irish hill. Not a door squeaked, in this house. Not one wall, within, ran even the slightest crack. The tool shed stood in order; the lawnmower enjoyed regular oil changes; rakes hung on racks in the garage, like soldiers in file, eager to claw away the enemies of the sacred grass.

The man of this house kept his metric wrenches in their plastic indentations in a great red, rolling tool cabinet. He washed his car whenever the sun shone, and on this day, he was buffing its glassy hood as he looked toward the next house, shaking his head in disgust.