s the only one with a pedicure. Though I couldn’t vouch for the woman wearing striped socks under her sandals, I’d be willing to bet that she didn’t have painted toenails.
I wished that I could take out my notebook. I didn’t think that pencil against paper would really be that disruptive. What about the woman next to me with the dodgy stomach? That wasn’t distracting? It positively screamed. And the woman who kept flipping maniacally through the pages of the Bible. What was she looking for?
I closed my eyes and tried to enter the silence, or the light, or whatever. My mind followed the sounds of a dog barking down the street, birds singing, distant traffic sounds, there goes that stomach again. What could she have eaten? And then the neighbor next door began to play the piano. Loudly, with the windows open. What Kind of Fool am I. Anthony Newly. I recognized it right away, having appeared in the play in high school. I could still remember the words as it turned out.
I started to relax. To sit in silence for an hour is actually not as boring as one might think. Parents would probably find a Quaker meeting heaven.
The silence of a meeting can be broken should someone be “moved by the spirit” to speak. Early Quakers were considered radical in that women had the same right to speak during meetings as men, something that might still be considered alarming in many churches.
During the Seven Oaks meeting, a few people were moved to speak. One mentioned the recent death of a friend, and she asked us to “hold his family in the light.” Another spoke of her response to a work of art that she had recently seen, and the third read a very moving passage from a an essay written by that most famous of American Quakers, William Penn. It was something beautifully profound about how Quakers view death. But I can’t quote it here because I was not allowed to take notes.
It did take a lot of work to sit in silence for an hour. You couldn’t just nod off. Though I have heard that people do fall asleep. And sometimes, yes, they snore. Th