“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 forever grateful for the Thacher education she was privileged to enjoy.

My freshman English class is always a little squirrelly on Wednesdays.  We meet last period, which ends at 12:55. They try hard to stick with Odysseus as he’s hanging on for what’s left of his life over the slurping maw of Kharybdis–but I know what they’re thinking …

How’m I gonna keep my horse from freaking out at the start of Keyhole?

There are a thousand variations on this question, of course, because the weekly gymkhana lies just the other side of Skylla: nearly a dozen different races X 61 freshmen (plus upperclass riders) X that many horses = plenty to concern a 9th grader here, to draw him or her away from the text. Just as soon as they dash out of Room C, they’re fully and legitimately in that next moment–changing for the weekly gymkhana as the run-up to Big Gymkhana Family Weekend, where points are tripled and it’s anyone’s game.

So Reader becomes Rider.

And then, as I’m on my way back from the New Field, where I’ve just taken some photos of the Varsity Girls’ Lax team prepping for their post-season game the next day (a heartbreaker, it turns out: a 9-8 loss in overtime), I hear hoofbeats behind me, and there’s Arianna, Kami, and Kennedy, trotting past me back to the barns, having packed in as many races as they could in 1.5 hours. Before I’m at my front door, they’ll have untacked, curried, and put away their steeds, raced again to their dorm rooms, hauled off their riding duds and on their track unis and footwear and become, each . . .

Runner.

I feel pull and power of another R-word: Respect, for all that my students do in a day, energy and enthusiasm driving their minute-by-minute creation of self and of community.

As I was heading from one photo opp to another on the Wednesday of Grandparents Days, gymkhana field to lacrosse, I left a scene I’ve watched too many times to count: adoring, amazed grandparents in the stands, eagle-eyed for their special one out there, riders running races or cheering each other on (often across enemy lines). This year, the mud made by dark-of night rains slowed things down a bit. That wasn’t a bad thing, really: fewer hearts in throats.

I’d found myself drawn this particular day less to the races themselves than to the fringe elements–kids having thumb-wars as they waited their turn to run, or talking and laughing on the sidelines, hollering for Orange, Blue, or Green, taking a slow solo lope around the fields. Watching it reminded me how much I admire these kids–most of whom hardly knew which end to feed when they arrived here a few short months ago. Such courage and fortitude! And how much I respect my colleagues who work with them through those months, through sun and dust, in arenas and on trails, with a mix of patience, firmness, understanding, occasionally tough love.

The Horse Program, from its serendipitous 19th-century beginnings, is still a rock-solid piece of what Thacher is. The races may get faster, the riders grow older and graduate, horses cycle in and out–but the School’s faith in all the lessons of the horse stays strong.

But now, my camera and I had to get on to the next thing. As I walked away from the field, I could hear the captains of the present underdogs leading their mid-afternoon rallying song, a cheer I sang (different team, 2600 miles away from this slice of heaven) in my own salad days:

“We are the Blue Team,
mighty, mighty Blue Team
Everywhere we go-oh
people want to know-oh,
who we ah-are,
so, we tell them,

We are the Blue Team. . . ”

Echoes from the past informing the present, promising the future.

On Sunday, an hour-long hike in the hills with Michael engaged all seven senses:

•kinesthetic: climbing up the Rhodes-Metcalf, up to the Gretch, back down the Corwen and ultimately linking to the Barkan
•auditory: jays jabbering in trees and bushes all along the trail; rustle of small fauna in the undergrowth
•organic: heart pounding harder, breathing more labored until, at last, the downhill
•olifactory: every spring smell now convergent–sage, greasewood, and farther away and below, orange blossoms
•tactile: rolling a snapped-off sprig of sage between my fingers (and, prontissimo, back to olifactory)
•visual: the folds of the canyon, switchbacks faintly etched in the foothills ahead and up, the valley view–a dozen kinds of verdure from the recent rain, quilt of orchards, shimmer of Lake Casitas a dozen miles distant, and closer in, the brick red of the track encircling kelly-green velvet
•gustatory: all of it, drunk down gratefully

Then, in a multisensory overload, we came off the trail near the manure pit at Hunter Barn, to hear (laughter, a fugue of talking, jangling spurs) and then see four freshman girls jogging from the barns to brunch, their morning ride over, their horses groomed and put away.

Michael: “That’s youth for ya: running in jeans and boots.”

We all heard this week at Assembly about a faculty member, who, as advisor to a certain esoteric campus activity, was called to an unusual job: chasing down an AWOL school pig named Spike and returning her to the pen after patching the offending gape in the fence. Actually, a second teacher, who lives close to Carpenter’s Orchard (where the pig-pen is) also helped with the wrangling.  The fact that the incident repeated two more times made me think about all the roles we faculty are called to–generally with a smile on our faces– that are pretty far outside a typical teacher-coach-advisor job description. I mean, we all come into this knowing that trying to put names to everything we do would be a silly exercise, but the incident of the pig in the night-time prompted me to ask that question of my colleagues.

•I take kids out to surf and then for burgers regularly.

•I programmed the thachergymkhana.net website to allow instantaneous scoring of gymkhana races using iPads on the field and presentation of results for races, barn penalties, etc. for all to enjoy

•I took a student down to Cal Tech over Christmas vacation so that she could analyze some salts she synthesized in the lab of a professor there.

•I bought and transported 150 burgers from In-n-Out for a fundraiser.

Everyone I know here takes on tasks far beyond any “call of duty,” and typically without a second thought. They make time where less than none exists to give more, to help Thacher become an even better place, its students better served.

It’s a 24/7 deal, this boarding school teacher business, but it’s what’s inside those numbers that keeps things interesting, eight days a week.

Remember three decades ago, The Big Chill, a breakout film for Glenn Close, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum, Meg Tilley, JoBeth Williams, and–as the dead guy whose face no one ever sees, Kevin Costner? (Clearly, I’m beyond worrrying about dating myself.) The first morning the old college friends are together, each comes into the big country kitchen at a different moment, to find running–well, jogging, back then–shoes that Harold, the successful businessman, has brought for everyone and stacked on the island. Time-lapse photography shows the space filling and emptying and filling again, as the day advances and each person finds his or her size.

I think of that scene often, reminded of it by the scene at my own kitchen counter every Saturday night. Open House can, and often does start with a single student coming in and planting herself or himself opposite me and the ovens, where we’ll chat, just us, for a few minutes. Sometimes, it’s a small gaggle flying in, landing, and lining up there, claiming every one of the six stools, some even doubled up. Often, when I turn to take cookies out of the oven, I turn back to a whole different set of faces, another conversation, new but known voices laughing. The disembodied hand, at the end of a reaching arm, grabs a cookie cooling on the rack; another extends with a napkin ready for one right off the sheet. If I follow the arm up to the shoulder and head, I know who I’m dealing to. The crowd can be dense.

A month or so ago, the experience was even more Big Chillish, the dinner for alums and their friends and families converging with the start of Open House. So there, at the counter, each time I turned, a conflation of eras–someone from a mid-century CdeP class next to a student who just figured out his second term class schedule. Someone’s little sister making friends with someone else’s little sister, both of them elbow-to-elbow with seniors and grads of just last June.

If I had a camera instead of a spatula, you could see it, too, from my point of view. Privileged, I know.

(Full disclosure: This photo is from last year. But they’re alums now!)

In Boston a couple of weeks back, as a break in the conference action–the annual meeting of The Association of Boarding Schools–Michael and I went cross-town, over the Charles, and down to Bertucci’s on Harvard Square, there to meet a handful of CdeP’s most recent grads. Over pizza and salad, Leeah (Northeastern), Trevor (MIT), Steffi (Harvard), and David (Tufts)–each of whom had been an advisee or English student of either Michael or me–filled us in on their professors and classes, their roommates, potential majors, Thanksgiving just past and holidays on the horizon, and, generally, residential learning life, post-Thach.

“So, what did Thacher teach you well? What did you already know that, maybe, others are still learning?” I asked them.

Here, in their words, the take-aways foremost on their minds.

How to turn off my lights! No one does that the way we did at Thacher.

How to write a good paper.

How to manage my time.

How to have friends of all kinds in the dorm.

How to live with people my age.

How to balance the work and the social.

How to get creative with a salad bar.

Let’s hear it for Ojai Mixed Greens!

Two years running, I tried a hand in each camp: one edition of The Catcher in The Rye (what we fondly came to call the “Wee Version”–the maroon cover most readers recall) in my right for the students who’d purchased that one, and in my left, the other–larger format, red carousel horse, sunshine yellow title, a reissue with 1950s cover art. Given how much in-the-text work we do, this juggling made me feel even clumsier than I actually am, but mostly it just took too much time to get everyone on the right page, right paragraph, right line. What with all that, plus reading glasses perpetually slipping southward on my nose and having to get to the other side of the room to re-up the heat every once in awhile, it was just too much.

So this year, we English 1 teachers were determined: it would be all for one and one for all, the reissue.  No choice.  And for me, sadly, the one with dramatically less marginalia and far fewer Post-its marking especially critical annotations.

Of course, on the plus side, the print was significantly bigger. And, serendipitously, another benefit: I had company. A student who’d studied the novel last year had, on our first day with Salinger, come smiling through the door with the Wee Version, confident that his thoughtful 8th-grader scribbles and highlighting would give him a leg up on the nightly reading and daily discussions. I tried rallying his better nature with the cry of the Three Musketeers, clapping him on the shoulder for emphasis– we’d be fellow travelers on a sail through the pages of a fresh, unmarked copy of the novel.

“Really? I can’t just use this one again?” He smiled hopefully.

“I know you’re comfortable with it, but no. If I can do it, you can do it. We’ll both wean ourselves off what we thought we thought about Holden. It’ll be fun.”

As the chapters ticked by, we both saw parts of the novel differently or more fully than before. For me, the very words on the page–a different font style and size from what had become so familiar to me over several years–yielded more meaning as I read each night’s assignment. In a sense, the medium was a whole new message–an object lesson in the value of even small changes for opening the mind one or two cranks wider.

. . . keeps going around. There’s probably no sense in even trying to find the first link in my personal chain of Shared Lit (not an academic course you can sign up for, but, rather, a course of action, a version of call-and-reponse, of good-reads-as-boomerangs). The latest chapter goes this way: Jackson–a senior–and I spent time together in English 1 three+ years back. Every now and then in the interim, we’d run into each other on campus and exchange gotta-read titles. I trusted his judgment and choices–”his” books never disappointed, always got me thinking in a direction I hadn’t considered before–narrative, voice, point-of-view, subject.

Last year, Jackson took on an Independent Afternoon Project in writing (creative non-fiction), to which I served as the advisor. At first, I set him loose in the library, where he’d slouch down in one of the leather wingback chairs with whatever I’d suggested he read to get the gears greased for his own work. After that, once he began writing, our weekly meetings focused on his creations: in my office in the house, he’d read his stories aloud, and we’d talk about challenges he was having, possible solutions. I’d give him more pieces to read. He’d come back with more of his own writing.

One day this fall, Jackson saw me on the Pergola and said he’d run into a wall with a piece he’d been working on, a story inspired by Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants. (Thacher students tend to aim high, and with good reason.) Could we talk?

Ummm. Yes.

And before the time was done, Jackson had dug into the binder of material he’d studied this summer and found one story–then another, then another, and a fourth–to loan to me.

So, on last week’s school holiday, I slept a little later than my usual 5:55 (no Zumba on a holiday, thank goodness), got up to fetch a cup of coffee, then crawled back into bed–unheard of school-year luxury!–to snuggle down with a dog-eared photocopy of Tobias Wolff’s Bullet in the Brain.

Ball’s in my court, I guess.

I teach first period two days a week, and on those Monday and Friday mornings, I typically (and gratefully) find the classroom much cleaner than I left it the day before–thanks to Joanna, Room C’s Morning Jobster Extraordinaire. In the appreciation engendered in me, that neat-and-tidiness is matched by other ephemera: magnetic poetry gifts on the board. Teenage id energy being what it is, I’ve had to remove a few words from the sea of little magnets over the years–you can probably guess pretty accurately what those potential offenders might be. (Context, of course, is everything.)

But mostly, I’m greeted by lines that make me laugh out loud, or puzzle a little, maybe just nod in sympathy with an impulse or view of the world. The fact that there are actually three sets of words up there–one for kids, one “regular” version, and one cowboy, no punctuation–makes the offerings all the richer, because I know that these “writers” have intimate knowledge of “dirt” and “critter” and “wrangle.”

So today, I read

street dinosaurs dally on the prairie

imagine night fly ing

leave behind my delicate angel mother

And wishful thinking: school let me sleep

All proof that putting words together is as irresistible for some as messing around with numbers and formulae and testing out dance combinations and basketball plays is for others. It–the home/school we have here–takes all kinds.

Before I head over to rev up the SmartBoard, I see one more, nearly lost in the muddle, a subject that perhaps needs no verb or direct object:

darn manure