In which our hero spends her first day at a new place in tears.

I arrived on a Thursday. "Hunger Awareness Day," for anybody familiar with the goings-on of Holden Village -- although I'll admit, I'd forgotten. Thursday's lunch is always spare, and the money saved out of our food budget donated to Lutheran World Relief or another humanitarian aid organization.

The upshot, for our purposes, is that I wandered off the bus and ate a large plate of plain rice by myself.

And then I went through staff orientation, where I was the only one in my class, and not knowing what else to do but eagerly await a proper meal at dinner, I read for a while from John Steinbeck's East of Eden. I was to the part where a pile of likeable Hamiltons died, and then Lee left and came back -- typical of the tragic-comic nature of that section of the book.

At Vespers, I learned that a woman on teaching staff that week was a dance instructor, when she led an uncomplicated version of the same circle dance we use to Psalm 133 in the Soul Purpose play "And They Danced." Her class demonstrated, and then what must have been a hundred people got up to join when invited. The rest of us sang along -- the same traditional melody we adopted for our use in the play, the words in Hebrew. "Hinei ma'tov u ma'naim / Shevet achim gam ya-had..."

The Hebrew made me think of Phil's and Isaac's and Mark's and my drinking song from years ago, the singing and the stomping of years of looking on as Esther.

And that was my very existential first day in the Village.