ManicDDaily

Because my brain was kind of dull today as I boarded the subway,  I thought simply of writing about “Friday”.

Friday was the day we had Cathedral services when I was in high school.  We wore blue green tweed jackets with a little insignia patch at the breast pocket, which were matched, on cold days, by plaid kilts, or tweedy a-lines; on warmer days, coupled with  seersucker dresses of regulation pink, green, blue, yellow.

It was a private school, with a vague (given that it was Episcopal) ecclesiastical bend.  The most important sign of that was our location, of course, on the grounds of a Cathedral, or, as it was called, the Cathedral “close.”

It was a genuine, or at least authentically copied, gothic cathedral.  Our Friday service was held in the nave.  While most of the high vaulted space was a soaring rebound of grey (stone and huge pillars of air surrounded by stone), the nave was carved from dark shiny wood.  It had an almost cozy, feel, like a breakfast nook in a mansion.  The pews of the knave sat in two or three rows that extended along its sides; hard and high-backed like the banquettes in a diner, they were stiff but comfortable, loungeable despite a design intended to enforce posture, smooth enough to accomodate sliding shifts of position.

It was a school service.  In a girls’ school.  So I can’t say that we were completely quiet.    Talking was was accomplished,  homework sneaked (though white blue-lined paper showed up pretty sharply against that deep dark wood.)  Still, there is something about a cathedral—did I mention the stained glass?—that enforces a hush.  (Even a whisper seems to echo in those tall stone spaces.)

Kids do not have very much of this kind of quiet today.  (Adults either.)  I’m not referring to the religious instruction, but to enforced (more or less) stillness.  No talk, no texting, no digital images, no electronic stimulation, no digital stimulation, no screen.  The primary excitement was the occasional standing hymn, which, due to Episocopal school traditions, was actually quite dramatic if you thought about the words.  We didn’t.  The meaning of all that soldiering and crusading passed us by, though the melodies were rousing enough.

Friday:  the morning began with an hour of drone and contemplation, music and bottom-shuffling, in a place where we could not help but feel small, caught between the heavy gravity of all that stone and wood, and the uplift of  glass-painted light.  Our heads, if not exactly bowed, were also not bombarded.

Afterward, we made our way across a large green lawn, the manic among us half-skipping beside our friends, the youngest holding hands.