White Gowns and Roses

On a warm evening in early June thirty-four girls in white formals with armloads of red roses walked down the aisles of a neo-gothic church in Indianapolis, Indiana, and received our diplomas from Tudor Hall School. When the ceremony had ended and the last echoes of John 14:27 had faded beneath the vaulted stone ceiling, we tearfully handed out our long-stemmed roses, one by one, to family and friends who came to wish us well.

Forty years have passed. We are scattered from Maine to Honolulu. Somehow when we gathered last week to tour the old campus, the rivalries, resentments and insecurities of those long-ago days had fallen away. We were a miscellaneous dozen or so who had not been close then and hadn't stayed in touch, but you would never have known it to hear our chatter.

"Remember when we ..."

"Where is ...?"

"Mrs. Kuprion's room! Oh, those Friday afternoon math 'tea parties' to catch up and get extra help!"

Mr. Zimmer's room no longer smelled of pipe tobacco from his lunchtime walks in the grounds. The offices, once so foreboding, looked tiny and insignificant stripped of the commanding presence of Miss Whitford and her assistant head, Miss Smith. The stage where we performed "Carousel" and "Brigadoon" is positively primitive compared to the current facilities at Park Tudor, the school that merged Tudor Hall and near-by Park School.

Forty years is a long time. My classmates have grown and matured. How could we not? We have experienced life as we never imagined it on that June evening--joy and success, death and loss, personal weaknesses, failures and everyday plodding. Some have discovered a faith in God that wasn't there in high school. Or perhaps, in our grown-up confidence, we are just more willing to talk openly about it. Some I considered shallow then, have gained depth. Others burst with expansive hearts and enthusiasm I was too blind to appreciate at seventeen. Something in me wants to apologize for the self-confident know-it-all I must have seemed at the time.

Sharon lost many of her possessions in a flood last spring. We gathered around her to replace some of her beloved books. 'Perhaps the biggest lesson driven home to me since the flood,' she writes, 'has been that “things” are just that: things. When everything else is stripped away, the core of our lives is all about our relationships. With God. With friends. With family. With our pets… and sometimes with perfect strangers.'

"To the girls, we'll not forget them," said our school hymn, but I had forgotten. I'm sorry about that. There was treasure there I was too wrapped up in myself to notice. But then perhaps we all were. We were young after all.

At the end of May the seniors of Park Tudor School will receive their diplomas. There will be boys among them, the successors of those Park boys who handed us up the steps lest we trip on our long skirts. The Park Tudor girls will be wearing white formals and carrying red roses. They have the adventure of life ahead of them.
[My sister and I with our beloved music teacher, Elise Marshall, at the awards banquet. If you are wondering where I am in the group photo above, I am the one with her eyes closed on the right in the back row.]