| A 47-Year-Old looks back at Reunions | ||
Walking those familiar pathways (only now there are girls on them everywhere-and they look happy too!) brought me back so swiftly and with such immediacy to 1971. How could it be that I'm 47? That we all are? I felt 17 again-only that couldn't be right either, because my youngest son is 17 himself now. Having been one of that small and uncomfortable band of "women" -speaking only for myself, I want to say I had a way to go before meeting that description-I was far too uneasy and overwhelmed by my classmates, that year, to make friends with much success. Back in those days, the 10 "women" of the class of '71-day students all-hung out in our assigned quarters in the infirmary, or on the couches of the art gallery, listening to our classmates Ben Tench or Graf Mouen at the piano. A public-school girl for 11 years, I'd never known the likes of the Harkness table, or the dauntingly intense level of interchange that took place there. I kept my books clutched tight to my chest, hurried from classroom to classroom, and seldom dared to speak more than a few words to my fellow students outside the classroom. It was understood that we were smart and hard-working and capable, and that great things would come from us. If I hadn't known that before, Exeter made it clear. But if a stellar future lay before us all, the present seemed dark and daunting. I spent that year, mostly, in stunned and anxious silence. How could I possibly belong to a group such as this one? So for me, reunions have provided what school did not-a chance to get to know, decades late, a group of men with whom I wish I'd been acquainted long before. I can walk into the dining hall now, at a reunion, and set my tray down next to one of my former classmates. Whether or not we were friends as students (and probably we weren't) we are likely to find stimulating common ground-and certainly none of the old fear created by the knowledge of each other's differences. What a relief. Just as it must be a relief, to my gay classmates, to be able, at last, to walk hand in hand down a path at Exeter, with a same-sex partner. Unimaginable in 1971. All these years out in what we at Exeter used to refer to as "the real world" have taught me to appreciate more fully the extraordinary nature of the group assembled at the school: the intensity of their passions, the commitment to a kind of excellence sorely lacking in most of the places we've encountered since. My intensely egalitarian children-aged 23, 19 and 17-would call it elitism, and surely it is (and that can of course breed a certain alarmingly isolated and rarefied outlook). But that "best and brightest" stuff also produces a group which, collectively, could change the world, and in many cases has. You feel it surveying the faces of our classmates, and there is a sense of pride (also of purpose) in knowing one's self to be part of such a group. Exeter assumed us to be capable of more than the average. It also instilled in us, I hope, the sense of obligation to give more than the average back. What struck me most, over the course of our reunion weekend, was how many different forms of giving back exist, how many definitions of excellence and accomplishment. And how dangerous it would be to forget that. Big Shots and Small Potatoes Sunday morning of my reunion weekend I found myself sitting in the dining room of the Exeter Inn, sipping my coffee and waiting for my friends Graf and John to emerge from their rooms so we could go to the dining hall together. I began to overhear (and then, I confess, to actively eavesdrop on) the conversation of a fellow reunion attendee from a class that came long after ours. He was having breakfast with a young Exonian who was evidently interviewing him for the school paper. As near as I could determine, the interview's theme was "How great it is to be rich and successful" and the likelihood that, properly applied, an Exeter education can get you there. At one point, the alumnus hailed a passing classmate, explaining to his young interviewer, "This guy has made a fortune. You'd better listen to him." I'm not sure when it was I actually spilled my cup of coffee all over myself: sometime between the point when Mr. Big got to filling the young man in on his views about FDR (he stole from the hard-working and long-suffering rich and gave to the lazy) and on the upcoming interdenominational service at the chapel later that morning ("That chapel was paid for by Christians," he explained to the young man, "and they'd be rolling in their graves if they knew. If the Hindus want a temple at Exeter, the Hindus can damn well pay for one"). I do know I was sufficiently troubled by what I'd heard that I felt a need to buttonhole the unsuspecting student journalist later, in the lobby of the inn, to let him know my views. Very likely the young man (the age of my youngest son probably) concluded that Exeter must surely, in among the savvy businessmen, let a few crazies in now and then. One, at least. I wanted so badly for this young man to hear, that morning, from someone deeply affected by her Exeter education, as I surely was, but for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with the power of that education to bring about advancement in business or finance-the wealth of old-boy networking opportunities provided by events like this weekend, the likelihood that an Exeter diploma could be parlayed into a six-figure salary, or more. page 1 | page 2
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