WHEN the Tars began arriving, quite a few of the parents who had driven them to the school came into the gym and took seats in the bleachers. Apparently they had decided that if the meeting was only going to last for thirteen minutes they might as well wait until it was over instead of going home and coming back.
“Attention!” I called out. “I want to talk to all the Tars before the meeting begins. Please! May I have your attention, all you Tars?”
Gradually, the Tars and their parents stopped talking and turned their attention to me.
“Thanks,” I said. “This won’t take long. I just want to go through the meeting procedure with you before we actually start the meeting. I think things will go a lot more smoothly if we all know what we’re supposed to do before we start doing it.”
Laughter. Behind me, Mr. Summers cleared his throat.
I cleared mine, too, and said, “I’ve been working on the Tars Manual all week—”
“Oh, that reminds me, Peter,” said Mr. Summers. “I’ve got some more notes for you. Things to add.”
I turned to look at Mr. Summers. “Things to add?” I said.
“Nothing really important, just part of the development of the Tars,” he said. “You have to learn to take these developments in your stride, Peter. You can’t just sit in the sand like a clam. You’ve got to move on—”
“Like the moving finger.”
He gave me another of those squints. “Yes,” he said. “You could say that.”
He stepped forward and addressed the Tars and parents in a raised voice.
“We all have to learn to leave the past in our wake, to move on, to go where the wind blows us, and roll with the swells. I’d like to say a few words about that before Peter continues. Many of you are in my science classes, so I know that you’ve seen that wonderful film of bean plants growing.”
All of us had. In the fifth and sixth grades, we left our ordinary classrooms for instruction in certain subjects that, I suppose, required talents ordinary teachers did not possess; these included music, art, and science. Everyone, at one time or another, saw the film that Mr. Summers was referring to; it was one of the attractions of elementary science instruction, along with the model volcano that actually erupted and the frank and baffling description of reproduction among bivalves. The bean-plant film had been made by photographing a pair of bean plants at one-hour intervals. The plants sprouted, grew, flowered, and bore beans in a few minutes, dancing jerkily to the ragged rhythms of short-lived phenomena, such as shifts of light and wind.
“You know how those bean plants move this way and that way,” Mr. Summers said, bobbing and weaving in demonstration. “They don’t know where they’re going, but they keep growing! Well, that’s the way it’s going to be for us Tars. We may lean off to the side sometimes.”
He leaned to the side; many of the Tars leaned in a similar manner.
“We may be knocked around by the winds of change.”
He reeled as if buffeted by wind; most of the Tars reeled along with him, and a couple of the parents rolled their shoulders sympathetically.
“We may wander a bit, like a ship without a compass.”
He took a few steps in the manner of a drunk trying to walk a line; there was some movement of Tars toward the floor, presumably to try walking in that manner. I held my hands up to stop them, and they obeyed, reluctantly.
“But we keep growing, like those bean plants! We keep growing and we keep going! That’s what the Tars’ Motto means!” he said.
I cleared my throat. He snapped his head around to give me a keep-your-mouth-shut look.
“—we’re growing, and we’re going! Onward, ever onward!’”
“Ye gods,” I said, under my breath, in just the way my grandmother did when something struck her as too illogical and wacky to understand.
Mr. Summers stood silently for a moment, breathing deeply. Droplets of sweat glistened on his forehead. “Tars of the First Water,” he said at last, “into the coach’s office. Humility session.” They waddled off, and Mr. Summers shouldered his bazooka. “All right, Peter,” he said as he turned to go, “get on with the meeting.”
In Topical Guide 221, Mark Dorset considers Photography: Time-Lapse from this episode.
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🎧 221: When the Tars began . . .