Sunset

When I was a very little boy I attended a school which was divided into two sections - one for boys, the other for girls. We hardly ever mixed. We hardly ever saw any of the girls or their teachers. Occasionally their headmistress would pay a visit and even now I recall how, as soon as she had left, the eye rolling of male teachers would start and the slightly scornful grins of disrespect.
She was not so much fierce but overwhelming. She was large of stature and loud of voice. She was, I thought, what was called "a dragon" of a woman.
We were all afraid of her; I think possibly the men on the teaching staff were too.
But I recall something she'd do that makes me warm to her in retrospect - though at the time I thought it daft.
If there was a beautiful sunset just before the end of a school day, she would march all the girls in her section of the school, out to see the sunset. They would stand there and look at it for quite a long time. I don't know what she told them, couldn't hear, if she said anything at all. Maybe she thought that they'd get some religious-like feeling from watching the sun go slowly down.
So recently when I have been reading article after article, review upon review, about the Rothko exhibition at The Tate in London, reading how, being in a room full of his paintings, people seem to get a religious kind of experience from it - then I think of the headmistress and the sunsets.
Rothko painted those seemingly meaningless abstracts of long lengths of colour on top of each other..... like the sunset when there are those great stretches of red and grey and white filling the sky. Which, of course, are as seemingly meaningless as Rothko's.
Thank you Miss.... Sorry I've forgotten your name.