It was a dizzying, brain-stuffing three days.

Every April for the past twenty years, Senior Exhibitions have reminded me how curious Thacher students can be, how passionate, how persuasive.

And this year, how much better than I they understand the basics of the Big Bang theory and the complexities of cult recruitment, government surveillance and of torture; the urgency of media literacy, of Alzheimer’s Disease research, and of prosecuting surf gangs.

But it took me all the way to my final “class” of the weekend–Jack’s investigation of the beginning and the end of the universe (and several events tucked between genesis and apocalypse)–to have the light go on in a new and startling way. It wasn’t about my students becoming teachers; I’ve always reveled in that aspect of SrExes. It was something I hadn’t thought fully about in other years: how Senior Exhibitions deliver the faculty members and parents in the audience to a view of each presenter as already at the next point on his or her trajectory. Just as we can sometimes see in the senior that first-week 9th grader we met three-and-a-half years ago–a gesture or a smile that’s remained constant–it is not hard at all to imagine the young woman or man at the podium well beyond Thacher in time and space–at another podium, even.

A couple of weeks later, I was driving another senior down to the bike shop in town. Jon had shared the English I classroom with me three years ago, and more recently, we’d explored personal narrative writing in English IV Honors. We began talking about the speed at which his final trimester was flying, then yakked about that first-round English class.  Jon laughed: “I hardly remember who I was!”

But I remember, and as with Jack and all the others who are about the graduate, Jon is becoming a walking, talking palimpsest of Jons–the one we met as a Second Visit, the one who showed up in the heat of early September to move into Lower School, all the ones between then and this moment–and, in promise and expectation based on all these, the young man yet-to-be.

Commencement’s around the corner, then reunions and random alum visits as far as time stretches, as long as the Thacher river flows.

Jack concluded his SrEx with a grin and that characteristic lift of the eyebrow: “The end might not be the end.” To reflect a truth made new to me this spring, I’ll rephrase that with a different helping verb: will not be.