“How was your daughter’s graduation?”

“Hey! How was the graduation this weekend?”

“How’d it go this weekend? Your daughter was graduating, right?”

Three’s definitely a charm in this case, or at least charming: the first three students I ran into on Monday morning after Big Gymkhana Family Weekend–the biggest, most populous, high-spirited, tradition-rich, all-School community weekend of the year–asked ME how MY two days away had gone, before I could ask them about theirs. One of them had picked up the silver dollar. One had had a great Rescue Race. All were on their way to other things that morning.

And yet.

In what I’ve come to appreciate as one of the loveliest expressions of Kindness–the third of Thacher’s four pillars of Honor, Fairness, Kindness and Truth–their genuine, warm-hearted solicitousness made my day–maybe even my week–just as it was starting.

Charming back to charm: the wondrous spell of a school and community that brings teenagers somehow out of themselves on a regular basis, out of a kind of solipsism most of us take as more typically adolescent.

Another expression of Thacher’s magic, and one I never, never take for granted.

P.S. This is Annie. She graduated from the University of Colorado/Denver with college honors and honors in her major. Proud parents? Yup. And grateful ones, too–for the Thacher education she was privileged to enjoy and, certainly as much, for the nurturing of a home-school like this one.