Parents’ Post A Newsletter for Parents and Friends of The Thacher School
Dear Parents and Friends:
final Post of the year begins with the sound of hefty pipes TThis clanging not far from my study window facing the center of cam-
pus—the last part of taking down the tent under which seventy graduates were, one by one, handed their Thacher diplomas on June 7—Thacher’s largest class in the School’s history. Ten days earlier, I’d stood with a few seniors by the flagpole, watching as the same big white truck ground its way up Pepper Tree Lane and eventually parked on the Forest Cooke Lawn. Its back door flung open, we peered in, and worried aloud at what we saw, or didn’t see: Just chairs? Where’s the tent? Had they forgotten the tent? Soon enough, though, chairs off-loaded, the big bags of canvas got the heave-ho, then, the metal posts. Within hours, the biggest visual symbol of festivities to come stood, stolid and important, over the lawn. Under that tent, Commencement came and went (though, in Thacher fashion, lingered ceremonially for a little over two-and-ahalf hours), but by Saturday afternoon, the scene was already a little ghostly: the fine new oak podium standing guard over a desolate scene of chairs breaking rank, over-folded, dog-eared programs lying here and there, a hat forgotten by its owner perched on a close-by tree branch.
Year-End 2003
Yet a week later, the tent again housed members of the Thacher family—graduates celebrating their fifth-year reunion all the way back through the years to the “old boys” whose memories of this place were hewn in the early 1930s. They numbered over 400, a small and fond army who’d returned, many with families, to remember when. Only one of the fourteen reuning classes (the most recent) actually recalls a graduation tent—at least this sort—and yet under it, in after-banquet speeches that ran for close to two hours, they found commonality and continuity, not, perhaps in the precise details of their individual Thacher experiences, of their particular and unique coming-of-age, but assuredly in the values underpinning them: honor, fairness, kindness, truth. In fact, relatively few—primarily only those of us who work and live here—have the privilege and infinitely rich perspective afforded by the two tent-events, but we hold a certain secret: when at the end of the second, generations of Thacher alumni and alumnae fill the space to the ridgepole top with the words and music of The Banquet Song, it’s not too difficult to imagine the freshly-minted grads of a week ago joining the celebratory throng a brief five years hence. They already belong.