There’s an unmistakable buzz on campus during the run-up to Senior Exhibitions–the undercurrent invisible but powerfully felt, especially by those who’ll soon be behind the podium.

This would be enough to tell the campus community that SrExes are fast approaching– but there’s more. Rehearsal sign-up sheets posted on doors rise and then fall back in afternoon breeze: semaphores.  The lights burn late in Rooms K, 14, Thacher, and Milligan; flip-flops slap on paths at unaccustomed, starlit hours, too.

My particular anticipation is bound up in having known these teachers from their early teenage years, having watched them grow into the kind of capability that lets them stand–a few with wobbly knees, for sure–in front of a crowd of peers, younger students, faculty members, family, and other adults, and hold forth for half an hour and then field questions on a subject they’ve kept close company with for months.

As I listen and watch, as I hear about biodiversity in the bight off Ventura and the CIA’s likely complicity in the beginnings of the national crack epidemic,  treatments for aphasia and fixes for nutritionless school lunches, it’s a sort of palimpsest experience: behind what I see in front of me, or maybe underneath, are the seniors’ former selves–the junior suddenly free to make her own choices during evening study hall or eagerly filling out the senior leadership application form, the sophomore caught up in the occasionally seismic social shifts of that grade and having to write more than one essay a week, the freshman hell-bent-for-leather in her first Hurry-Scurry race or lining up on the kids’ slide in Libbey Park; and back farther yet, the barely 14-year-old struggling to hoist her backpack and step shakily onto the trail to Golden Trout Camp.

I see them all.

And already, even before June 8, I miss every single one.