“Ahead and behind wound the line of the hungry…”
—Morro Bay, California © 2023 Craig Dahlberg
My exterminator paraded the last fallen warrior of The Rat Wars through our bedroom, its limp body dangling from its long naked tail, head thoroughly flattened by the steel spring of the rat trap—a real ratastrophy. The pelt was surprisingly clean, a brown body with a white fur mask across the face. I wondered how large a garment a skilled taxidermist might have fashioned from all the deceased rats retrieved from my attic. Rat hides collected, preserved with salt and expertly sewn together—why not rat fur gloves or a rat fur scarf? A handsome pair of rat fur socks, perhaps?
When cornered or trapped, neither humans nor rats do very well. We all look for a way out. Like my unsuspecting rats, I had gradually backed into a trap of my own making. Reared in a conservative, rule-following family, I had learned well how to color between the lines. Armed with correct manners and a conformed instinct to please, by high school I was reliably prepared to enter a boys’ boarding school, far from home. Along with my eleven other classmates, we learned the standard high school subjects, but at an accelerated rate. During winter, we had but to step out of our dormitory and ski down the mountain, then take the funicular back up the mountain. We were boys then, turning into men, far away from the girls who were turning into women.
Returning stateside after attending the boarding school abroad, I enrolled in an affluent high school with a challenging and emotionally disruptive social scene. The ratio of automobile-owning teenagers to the high school teen population was nearly one-to-one. Girls draped themselves into the cockpits of Corvette convertibles piloted by their pimply-faced, steady boyfriends. Heavily modified Ford Mustangs snarled out of the student parking lot. I was an outsider. I crawled into the nearly-empty yellow school bus, staring out the window in consternation, ready to be transported to my silent home, punctuated perhaps by a family-centric TV show—Mitch Miller and his band, or Lawrence Welk’s drone to his orchestra, “And a one, and a two!” How conservative. How comfortable. How stifling.
It was a confusing, baffling time, made more so after plotting for six months to ask a girl out on my very first date. I was shot down with the most pedestrian of explanations: “I’m busy that night.” I backed so far into my rat hole that a Rat Hole Safety Inspector would have required the installation of a breathing ventilation tube.
And then—Lord have mercy—came college. With it would come the specter of more teenage wraiths mutating into young adults, with me looking on, locked away by fear, silence and envy.
Three times each day, at precise intervals, the college dormitories belched out their inhabitants, who joined the winding, rapidly-lengthening cafeteria line. I would wriggle myself uncomfortably into the line, managing my discomfort by staring at the blank tile-covered, creme-colored wall, silently calculating the total quantity of shiny ceramic tiles, as if on a divine mission.
Ahead and behind wound the line of hungry students, a serpentine row along the stairway running through me, then past me, up toward the top of the stairway. Young women with side-swept hair bobs wore pink, orange and citrus green mini-skirts. For the college-age men, it was mop-top hair, extended sideburns and wispy mustaches, paisley shirts and bell-bottom trousers. Teetering on the steps, I hugged the hand rail. Gradually, we came within sniffing range of the standard-fare shepherd’s pie as we rounded the corner to the cafeteria.
I was acrophobic, balancing on one step, fearful to look at the next person in line behind me. Nonetheless, I shot a glance toward her downward-facing head. Unexpectedly, she glanced up at me. I was galled. Good grief. What to do? It was too late to look away. “Hi,” I muttered, confounded that was all I could come up with. What was wrong with me?
That night, my churning stomach made little progress against the shepherd’s pie. I desperately needed a way out of my painful introversion and self-imposed social exile.
I concocted a Grand Scheme.
What do you do when folks within the smell of your breath smile at you, ask your name, and express genuine interest in your story? The answer is simple—probably you smile back at them, ask their name, and ask about their own story. In so doing, I would weaponize my Grand Scheme.
The next day, I again stood in the cafeteria line, one person before me, one person behind me. The same conflict burned—what to say? What to do? But this day, I had promised myself, things would be different. I again half-turned my head to the one student before me and the one student behind me. And this time, I heard myself exchanging names, and listening to their stories as we wound up the dining hall stairway.
And so the Grand Scheme began. I learned the names and stories of two students in each meal line, the one ahead and the one behind me in line, three meals each day. Like a fledgling the first time out of its nest, I discovered a bigger world, and my life gradually transformed from inward isolation to outward-focused engagement.
As with all great discoveries, I was ruined for the past; I could not go back. To this day, the Grand Scheme lives on. These many decades later, I still happily enjoy the effects of this single decision—to attend to the One Before Me, and to attend to the One Behind Me.