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.]

Nine Hundred is less than 12 million

"This is the only time in the year when we have the whole school together," the alumni coordinator told me when she asked me to speak. "There will be students from age four through seniors in high school."

"How many?" I asked, wondering how I could handle the age span.

"About 900."

"900? 900 kids ages four to eighteen?"

She didn't tell me that I would come after several other speakers in the Founders Day program, that the little ones would be beginning to fidget and the older ones to yawn. Young people can't fathom what it is like to look back on these years after a lifetime.

I didn't try. I read them a story--Toto in Trouble (Shuter and Shooter, 2006). It's a funny little story that got the wiggles out of the little ones and drew laughs from the older ones. They sat still while I talked about Toto and children like him who live in child-headed households because AIDS has taken their parents. I challenged those who were oldest in their families to think about what it would be like to be responsible for their younger brothers and sisters--not just to babysit while their parents had an evening out--but to be responsible for what the family would eat tomorrow, for the clothes they would wear next year when their current wardrobe was worn out or out-grown. "What would you do if someone got sick?" I asked. "Would you make everyone go to school and do their homework, or would you just give up and let them do whatever they wanted?"

There are nearly twelve million orphans in Africa today--a lot more than the 900 students at Park Tudor. Twelve million is more than all the children in all the schools in the state of Indiana. In fact, it is about as many as all the children in all the schools in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan--all with no mother and no father.

I showed pictures of my kids in Tembisa, and talked about reading with them. I challenged the 900 young people (who weren't fidgeting anymore), "The founders of this school knew their students would be privileged. They knew you would be gifted young people. They wanted to prepare you to serve your community. Today with the Internet and global economy, that community is the whole world. You can't solve everyone's problems, but I want to challenge you to find something you can do that will make a difference."

At least some of them got the point.

[Excepts can be viewed on the Park Tudor Facebook page.]