Mr. Holman Dreams: Part One of Two

RACHEL ATTITUQ QITSUALIK

“Sometimes I still dream about him,” a fellow Stringer Hallite (or is it “Haller”?) once confided to me. I know what he means. I have Mr. Holman dreams too. In them, he is very far away, like a distant radio signal, but still quite big, as in life.

Mister Holman, of Stringer Hall.

Even today, I can easily picture him standing outside of his office, holding a bag of donuts and a Styrofoam cup of coffee that he’s picked up on some errand. He wears his old fashioned, brown leather bomber jacket, and soberly sensible crepe-soled Wallabies. His only concession to modern dress is a dark pink, button-down shirt, or some brightly coloured tie.

His look is one of a staff-sergeant in the army (which he had been at one time), or of an aged Norman Schwarzkopf. But I liked him. He was easy to talk to, and if you were blunt with him, he was blunt right back. Like the time he called me into his office after noting that my math marks were not exactly stellar.

“How come your math marks are going down?” he asked in his gruff way. I squirmed a little. I knew this had been coming for a while.

“It’s that I’m not sleeping well,” I began lamely, pussyfooting around the real reason that I had already hypothesized long ago.

Quiet glare.

“I don’t think I should be on the pill cause I’m not having sex.” I plunged right into it. “Mrs. Moreby thought I should be on it to clear up my pimples, but I think it’s doing something to me.”

“What? You’re on what?”

“Norynil One. She said it would clear up my pimples, plus I have to be under an ultraviolet lamp once a week. She said it would regulate my period.”

“I’ll talk to her. I want you off those right away, you hear me?”

“Yes sir.” We always had to address him that way.

I made a fast exit, leaving a baffled but concerned Mr. Holman behind. I miss that. He had a way of drawing what was important out of you.

Another time, I was explaining to him that I had a real problem relating to my father, that our personalities were so enmeshed that it was hard for me to have any objectivity about what he thought and did.

“Maybe,” he had told me, “you are too much like him, and you project a lot of your problems on him. After all, you admire strength in him, and his creativity, the same way you admire those traits in yourself. It only goes to follow that you would hate things about him that you hate about yourself.”

I felt like a bolt of lightning had struck me out of the blue.

Mr. Holman was an elder and he didn’t even know it.

Many years later, I would find myself asking my friend, “When you dream about Mr. Holman, what is he doing?”

“Well, just standing there, being himself.” There was a long pause.

“Sometimes I wake up and I’m missing those people, and Mr. Holman, like they’re still alive. I wake up with tears in my eyes.”

Me too.

In one of my dreams, he is an old, old man. He had secured funding for Stringer Hall, to run it for one more year. I had come back, even though I had already graduated, because nothing else would really feel normal.

He is supervising a shipment of supplies that he had ordered for Christmas. Some Stringer Hall kids couldn’t afford the airfare to return home to their families for Christmas. No matter what was going on politically or financially, Mr. Holman always made sure that such children had a grand time where they were. There were huge tables of turkey, pumpkin pie, and assorted candies. And every single soul got a Christmas stocking.

In this particular dream, he turns to me, and says something to the effect that it is not easy to feed 400 students. I answer as best I can, telling him to try and hang in there for another year, that only he could pull off a job like this. It’s all beginning to fall apart, he says. Not if you don’t let it, I insist. He nods and walks away.

(Continued next week.)