Love Divine

I experienced Graduation and Anniversary Weekend at St. Paul’s School for the first time in the spring of 2002 as a third former (or, as the rest of the world calls it, a high-school freshman). Third formers at SPS work as waiters and busboys during Saturday’s picnic lunch and I remember watching while alumni streamed into the white tents set up on the chapel lawn, looking as happy as I’d ever seen a group of old men. I also remember not being particularly surprised, partially because I was young enough not to realize that returning to your high school for a reunion every year was not practiced widely but also because I had lived at St. Paul’s for nine months and already suspected I would want to come back as often as possible once I graduated.

Over the past five years I learned through other friends and pop culture movies that high school reunions usually take place in the form of a dance with a disco ball in high school gyms, and that the main purpose of said reunions is to prove to your old classmates that you have either become better than they ever were or that you are still as awesome as you were in high school. While I will admit that this past weekend I witnessed certain ex-hockey players clinging to their awesome factor from SPS days, for the most part I looked forward to seeing my high school classmates. We lived together for four years – each one of us always struggling at one thing or another, each of us helping others through their own particular difficulties. Hockey players and chess club champions crowded around the same couches in the library after practice at night to get help conjugating Spanish verbs from artists, and everyone knew that while they excelled in one arena (or even three or four) they still needed help to stay afloat in all the others. Cliques existed, of course, because in any larger group of people they will – wanting to surround oneself with like individuals is natural – but SPS cliques never seemed exclusive to me, simply formed loosely because musicians spent all their spare time in the music building and ultimate Frisbee players spent theirs on the lawn. In a weird reverse of the norm, we all made fun of the “dumb” kids – ones who, for example, entered high school without already knowing algebra. In retrospect this seems crueler than the usual school environment, of which we were all products, where the smart dorky kids get taunted. Five years later I’m realizing that it really isn’t fair for smart kids to gang up on dumb ones in high school, because on the whole the smart kids do end up getting the better end of the deal.

Anyway – I’ll get back to waxing interestingly. SPS Graduation/Anniversary Weekend consists of a whirlwind of activities planned for the alumni, beginning on Friday afternoon at around 1pm with registration and ending on Sunday afternoon with graduation. Like any elite prep school we have a Latin play, a 5K, a chapel service/alumni meeting, a parade, and a bevy of reunion meals. Saturday morning I arrived on campus early enough for the 10am chapel service but not quite early enough for the 8am run, which was due in part to the excitement of the night before, during which two members of my form managed to mar their records with arrests for drunk and disorderly. The alumni relations committee relegated us to the Red Roof Inn in Loudon, New Hampshire, twenty minutes away from SPS, because the form of 2004 caused such a ruckus last year that no one else wanted to take the 5th-year reuniters. We complained quite a bit on Friday evening, but by around 2am it became clear that the alumni relations committee had in fact made an excellent decision in our exile.

In chapel we sang the school hymns and recited the school prayer. When I attended St. Paul’s I hated the day of the year during which we sat in our hard wooden assigned pews and waited as the names of alumni who passed away during the wars were read out; during my first alumni chapel I learned that the names of all alumni who passed away during the previous year were read. I tried to settle in uncomfortably, preparing myself for a time of great boredom and wishing I were outside wandering our 2,000 acres the way I used to whenever I had a big project or paper due. When we were in deaths from the form of 1934 (they’re read chronologically by form), I began thinking about the tradition of reading the names of the dead. At SPS I’d always thought of them floating up into the rafters like ghost bats, unable to really let go of the world until their names echoed through the chapel. Sometimes after the memorial services I would have nightmares about dead alumni drifting around campus, and they always looked a little like the men I saw from the form of 1929 this past weekend, only a little more translucent. I got so spooked from my overactive imagination that I became convinced that I’d read these ideas in an Edgar Allen Poe story and spent my fifth-form winter re-reading all his works to find the image. After Saturday morning’s service I met BG out on the chapel terrace and we sat quietly on the wall looking over the pond. Eventually she said, “I know this is vaguely Mormon, but reading out the names of the dead – I know you think it’s creepy,” (BG was my roommate at SPS for three years and witnessed my nightmares and the Poe period), “but isn’t it a little reassuring to know that after you die someone will still be speaking your name in our chapel?”

And it is, in a strange way. I have spent much of my life feeling slightly out of place. At SPS I found myself surrounded by others like me because they were unlike most people, which may be a confusing distinction to anyone normal. We all grew up trying to figure out how many questions we should answer incorrectly to walk the line between pleasing our parents, who knew how smart we were, and not intimidating the other kids in the class, who would make fun of us if they knew how smart we were. We left home at fourteen and entered a world where the coolest of us knew every country in the world or had already finished calculus by sixteen, but more importantly, we entered a world where all of our possible friends had battled that precarious situation of being different and trying not to. St. Paul’s is a day’s journey from where I grew up, but in some ways it feels more like home than I imagine anywhere else ever could. It is a little Mormon, but I like the creepy idea that some extended family of outsider dorks will hear my name read out when I die.

After the chapel service we lined up to parade through campus with the form of 2010 at the very end, and when we reached the edge of campus we all lined the road and applauded as 2010ers walked through. I didn’t know anyone graduating but I remembered well how it felt to be a day away from graduating SPS and have all the alumni cheering you on, and I have to say it was pretty fun to see all those 18-year-olds grinning and feeling important.

BG and I made our way through lunch, photographs, crew races, and a lobster/steak dinner, trying to suppress being overwhelmed. We hung out with our good friend TL much of the day and at some point as he spoke with someone else I noticed that his maroon-colored collared shirt in fact displayed the Arby’s logo. When he sat back down we asked him about it, and he said, “I got tired of people asking me if I was employed, so this seemed like a good idea.”

That was two days ago and it’s still making me laugh a little.

Yesterday and today I’ve done the bus/plane/shuttle/metro/loose your luggage and argue with Delta about having it delivered before you leave Atlanta, then at 6:15 tell them to just keep it in the airport because you’re going to pick it up before you leave Atlanta, then reaching the airport and having it on the delivery van dance. All the way I’ve had our school hymn, “Love Divine”, stuck in my head. Two lines suggest that I “Suddenly return and never, Never more Thy temples leave”.

Though I yearn to follow those instructions, I fear I will only do so when it’s my name they’re reading in the chapel.