The Day I Saw God in Trigonometry Class

Or perhaps it was just Euclid. But first, a tangent…

I had been kicked out of boarding school, 10th grade. My college prep cred gone out the window after being snitched out by a teacher, not much older than I, for being on the wrong side of the tracks on a Sunday. But that’s another story. At the time I didn’t value the importance of “college prep” and sure as hell didn’t care. A luxury of ignorance that seems to escape the kids these days.

At the time, I was gleeful to be dismissed— only 6–8 weeks from then end of the year, and summer vacation. I was riding on some kind of “screw em all” high. What adolescence is all about I suppose. It was decades ago now, and hindsight is what it is. It was probably Spring of 1982, and I’d spent the last 2 years in a up-and-coming southern prep school which had the requisite collegiate features: A lake, 3 story dorms, lots of grass and trees, and stone arches. A big chapel with a pipe organ and stained glass. In this one, the headmaster was a born-n-bred Georgia Baptist, a onetime preacher-turned-educator, a huge, square tank named Joe with a big smiley face, brylcreem head and oversized hands. “Hello Sunshine”, he’d say, his big hand a 40-pound octopus suddenly planted on my teenage shoulder. “Hello, old bigot who doesn’t know shit”, I’d think (though in fewer words). Now I think back and wonder how the hell he put up with little pissants like me. He must’ve been in the army at some point.

So “Hello, Sunshine” were the very words he used the day he came into my dorm room and let me know that I had been expelled. I was already on a short leash after an incident where other fellow classmates were dismissed, and I got caught off campus, so it was the “last straw”. He was nice about it, really. I suspect the man had compassion. Although I was a sarcastic and ungrateful PITA at the time, I was able to see and appreciate it. Before lunchtime I was in the car going “home”, which at that point in time was Atlanta, GA.

So I spent the last 6 or so weeks of my sophomore year going to a public high school in Atlanta. A public school, much to my grandparent’s chagrin, and my delight, since I wasn’t in a boarding school anymore. There was a kind of relief, and it was glorious.. or so I thought at the time. No one (except that one crazy teacher) cared about my homework. No one paid much attention to me, and even if they did I had lost all reason to care. At that point school was easy for me, except for occasionally navigating issues with authority.

Like my peers, I grew up with the rock music of the 60’s and 70’s. I was riding the punk and “new wave” of the early 80’s. I was well steeped in an ethos that had a strong distrust of authority. Mom should’ve never bought me those issues of Mad magazine. An avid reader, at this point in my young life, I‘d been absorbing a lot of the counter-culture canon of the time: Hunter Thompson, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman. On the more psycho-spiritual or mystical side, I was reading Aleister Crowley, Carl Jung, Alan Watts, and others. I found the connection between these things fascinating. At the time I‘d just devoured Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-aid Acid Test” with a kind of amazed fervor. This shit that was high school was just something I just had to get through— it just felt so ridiculous. Or so I saw it at the time. Things are intense when you’re 15. You feel everything, but you really don’t know much, certainly not as much as you think you know, but that’s how you learn. Your brain or heart tells you to put your hand in, and maybe you get burned. Hell yeah. Hello, World.

So there at the end of the semester, I had decided: When I was finished with the school year I was moving to California.

Why was I in that boarding school to begin with? The answer is really a story of teen-age survival. The compressed version is that, under the influence of a new psychopathic step-dad, my mother had signed over all rational thought to a religious cult, compounded by the shadow of 1979’s cold war fear. And so one beautiful and terrible Spring day, under threat of a forced head-shaving, I ran away from the farmhouse in the Missouri boonies where we lived. I hitchhiked my way back some 700 miles back to people I felt I could better trust— my grandparents, who promptly enrolled me in that southern private/boarding school world.

But fast-forward those 2 years I’d been in boarding school, and the parents had changed (or so I’d thought). The grass is always greener, and even more so in Santa Cruz, CA, where they’d moved. They had stopped bombarding me with guilt. Instead they were open, more accepting and damn they lived in a cool surf town. Meanwhile I was still in Racistville, GA. But I could see that light at the end of the tunnel. I was on to something! There was a pattern to things. Life, and living. Alpha and Omega. And it came to a beautiful point a couple of weeks before the end of school, on a lovely day in May, in math class — Trigonometry.

That day, alive with future possibilities, I didn’t really give a damn about what Coach BlahBlah was going on about. I sat in my wooden right-hand desk chair, drawing some stream-of-consciousness stuff that you do when you’re that age and stuck in class. I had pages of poetry, funny sketches of faces and impressions. Some kind of primordial mind-soup of the high-school gestalt. Sometimes I wish I could go back and see those notebooks.

At that point I started writing a poem about “The Now”, about it as the path between Alpha and Omega. The origin, the starting place (0,0). To say it now sounds so corny, but at that moment to my young teenage self, something clicked into place. It was as if the entire present universe converged with my paper and pencil, and the larger macro of what Coach BlahBlah was saying and writing on the board. I suddenly realized that I was writing words he was saying, before he spoke and wrote them on the board. These parts of the lecture were weaving into my poem like some time warp on the loom of life. It was like I’d found a key, opened a door and slipped around the dimensional corner of those moments. That really happened, and it blew my mind. I found my self knowing that the words I wrote would be on the board and in the air, the teacher having said it. My perception of the class room, the building, the space outside.. it suddenly expanded and I was like a point cloud over the classroom, and it’s moment in space/time. Yet I was also there drawing the symbols being used a moment later for this rather pedantic description of trig functions and geometry. But that description was a perfect metaphor for that moment, and where I was— right there. And I was grinning my ass off while writing the next lines until I got to some flow point where I just let the space come in... It was like the dream where you realize you’re flying, and you just keep doing it, fully conscious and aware. I must’ve looked like an idiot with my mouth agape. I wonder if that teacher had a similar experience? Best Teacher Ever??

It must have only lasted for a short while, probably no more than 20 seconds, but time was extended for me. A “peak experience” indeed! But it stuck with me, and stands out to this day, so much so that here I am decades later writing about it. I’m sure it could be explained away— of course I knew what he was going to say, ‘cause I already knew that stuff—duh... But it doesn’t matter, because in that moment I experienced something profound that is rare in life: a much needed trust that things are OK. A certainty of oneness and connection. Thank You, Universe.

I have been lucky enough to find that “synchronicity” more than once in this life, occasionally while playing music, or being in nature with friends, but that one was really special.

Somewhere along the line of life I lost the little page of words and scribbles that was a kind of proof that it happened. Which is OK… “Art is not eternal”. The point of Zen, you don’t hold on — it’s just something to help see the now. The Point, the Line, Alpha and Omega. Circles and cycles. Something like that was a magic key for me at the time. No wonder the ancients held geometry to be sacred. It reinforced my awe at mathematics and physics, and our place in it all. It kept me looking around corners for a while, even when things got bad again. And they would.

But that day— it was golden.