Eating Dinner Scene
June 22-23, 1990
A call for ‘circle’ rang out and Lauren said, “This is my favorite part of the day.”
As the crowd rose to their feet, River helped Lauren stand up and then Lauren clasped Bridgette’s left hand and a teenage boy took hold of her right and tugged her in his direction. Lauren pulled Bridgette one way, the boy the other as they inched backwards, then shuffled to the left until the chain of humans assembled into a gigantic circle. The loop curved around a young man in a black trench coat that seemed out of place here among the brightly colored parkas and Mexican serapes and the young man stared at Bridgette as a child does before learning it’s rude to gawk. The circle tugged them north and the black trench coat disappeared in the crowd.
Lauren pointed towards a short gray haired woman approaching the center of the meadow, her peasant dress bright white in spite of the dusty trails and patches of mud. “There’s La Abuela. I bet she’s going to do a blessing for the meal.”
The Grandmother. Bridgette couldn’t imagine her grandmother at The Gathering or as part of her life for that matter. Grandmother Schmidt showed up at funerals and graduations wearing a dark suit and complained about the food, the music, or whatever Bridgette was wearing. Grandma Larson hated her. The last time she’d seen the woman was a year after Dad disappeared. She had pointed her finger at Bridgette and said, “It’s your fault Redford got the lead. You and your chickenpox left him too tired to audition properly.”
When La Abuela reached the center of the circle, she lifted her hands to the sky, then bent over and pressed them into the ground. Straightening, she spoke about the Aztlan ways, about the Sun God, about the Conquistadors who had killed her Grandmother’s Grandmother’s Grandmother. She spoke about identifying the patterns that created unhappiness in the past and about consciously altering them in the present. She lifted a yellow flower in the air. “Watch your footsteps my children, Mis amigos son pequenos. Please don’t crush them.”
La Abuela finished speaking and Bridgette felt she had reached a new level of awareness. Her mind grasped a wordless clarity about life and she wondered why she had never before realized her own power. She wished Grandmother Schmidt had shared wisdom instead of criticism.
A vibration swelled in the distance and rolled towards her. She recognized the sound: Om – the universal sound of peace. All around her voices oscillated at different frequencies. She shut her eyes and allowed the surge to massage her chest, thighs, lips. The Om rolled in fuller waves and then receded like the tide until there was silence. She wanted to paint this experience on a large canvas. The Om would be apricot swirls coming out of the center, twirling its way across a steel blue sky. The mountain would loam over them, dark and foreboding in grey-cloaked mystery.
Cries of “Rainbow” filled the air and the crowd burst into a roar of joy. Bridgette spotted the faint rainbow draped across the top of the mountain. Thousands of people whooped and hollered as they stretched their clasped hands towards the sky. For a minute, it seemed like they were all floating above the meadow. “Praise Jah,” “Goddess has given her blessing.” This was the sign she had been seeking. Dad was here. She felt his presence. They were closing in on each other. In the meantime, she had come home.
A voice from the center of the meadow bellowed, "Four concentric circles!"
Chains started to form. Someone called out, “If you want to get fed, we need concentric circles five feet apart.” The crowd jostled and reformed before people started to sit down and Bridgette followed along.
River and Lauren pulled out bowls and Bridgette followed their lead.
A young man approached Bridgette carrying a white bucket. “Pinto beans with rice?”
“Yes, please.”
He scooped out a solid clump of brown rice and beans and held it over the bowl careful not to touch his ladle to her bowl, serving, as Lauren said, in the gathering tradition of not sharing germs. With a slight shake of the hand, the clump broke lose and fell into Bridgette's bowl.
“Thank you brother,” she said. It was like magic. The bellow of the conch shell beckoning the tribes back to the community womb of their ancestors. Like responding to a cellular memory, the people milled about in peaceful chaos before transforming themselves into symmetrical patterns. She wondered if the first gathering twenty years ago had been this way or if the people had invented these ways of creating the deceptive chaos of a fractal.
“Hot sauce? Spike? Tamari?” asked a woman wearing a kitchen apron with multiple pockets. “We’ve got Louisiana fire sauce and Thai peanut sauce.”
“Fire sauce please.” Bridgette dug into her clump of beans and rice as if she were eating at a five-star restaurant.
“Salad?”
Bridgette held her bowl out and a small scope of shredded cabbage and carrots landed on top of the beans. She savored each smoky bite, enthralled by the food, the woman eating beans with chopsticks, the coral sky melting into raspberry sherbet overhead.
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