Within a single 22-hour period this week, my lucky role as Head of School afforded me the experience of three distinct and distinctive joys. The first was the Lower School Spring Concert on Wednesday evening. I don’t think I’d ever heard so many happy lyrics about canoes and crawdads and the “fishin’ hole,” or such smart ones about the confluences of the Missouri, Mississippi, and Meramec Rivers. The second delight was the Golden Rams Luncheon on Thursday, which reunited and feted Country Day School alumni and Mary Institute alumnae from the Classes of 1949, the Classes of 1974, and every five-year vintage between. The third was the culmination of Senior Celebration Day a few hours later with its cross-campus parade of happy-tearful near-graduates through ranks of happy-tearful parents, teachers, and underclass peers. May is a month of perspective.
I so often lament that other members of our extraordinary and expansive MICDS community are not privileged with as many opportunities as I am to witness the range of our collective reach into memory and possibility alike. “Miss Heron would read such wonderful stories to us,” Dee Halley ’49 recalled yesterday as we took our places for lunch, peering up at me but peering past me as well, it seemed, into her childhood. This week commemorates the 75th anniversary of Mrs. Halley’s graduation from Mary Institute. “Do you still do that with the children?” Her question left me wishing it was all that I do—wondering whether it was all I should do—and reasoning that it would be a good life’s work, so warm was her recollection. Mrs. Halley was in fifth grade when the United States entered World War II in 1941, as were the other alumnae and alumni with whom Ruth and I enjoyed conversations at our lunch table: Ted Baldwin ’49, Paul Hampeter ’49, Steve Loeb ’49, and Marlita Weiss ’49. It was long ago, and it was not so long ago.
Some of the same JK children who two nights ago were gushing about life on the river from the Mary Eliot Chapel stage—the same stage where Grace Heron, Class of 1901, read to her students in the 1940s—will graduate in 2037 and return for their own 75th reunions in 2112. Whoever is Head of School at that time will marvel at their stories just as Ruth and I marveled at those shared with us yesterday. If my successor is exactly the same age in that year as I am in this one, they will not be born until 2059. It is far away, and it is not so far away.
For the Class of 2024, the outset of their MICDS journey was not so long ago, nor is the outset of their next one so far away. Congratulations, seniors, on your final day of school! More happy-tearful moments await you and your loved ones between now and your graduation ceremony on May 19—and then you will begin anew. What stories you will have to share in 2099 at your own 75th reunion! Just think of all the people who haven’t even been born yet who cannot wait to hear them. Memory and possibility, possibility and memory.
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. Happy Grandmother’s Day to you and your loved ones.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist: Long As I Can See The Light by Creedence Clearwater Revival, the eleventh track on their 1970 record Cosmo’s Factory, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest albums ever made (Apple Music / Spotify)