Nearly 3,000 Buckley Graduates' Carved Plaques Hang on the Walls

Eagerly is doing heroic work in that sentence. Some of those men are searching eagerly. Some are searching the way you search for a photograph of yourself from 1993 that someone has posted to a group chat: quickly, in order to stand in front of it.

You choose it at fourteen or so, and it hangs there when you are fifty, still a shark. At home, the things you made at thirteen are allowed to disappear. A drawing comes off the refrigerator when someone needs the magnet. Buckley keeps the shark.

The plaque is the end of a long apprenticeship. Crafts at Buckley begins in Class II, with small classes learning to use saws, rasps and files on projects including submarines, swords and boats.

Swords. In woodshop. At eight. I was not allowed to use the stapler until high school.

The rest of the school runs on the same principle that boys should make things in public. Every boy, from the youngest grade through the oldest, performs in an annual class play, fully costumed, which the school says has been a tradition for as long as anyone can remember. Class VI and Class VIII put on full musicals; recent ones have included Peter Pan, Little Shop of Horrors and Newsies. And in Class VI, the music curriculum includes the study of "the nature of the changing voice," which is the most considerate thing I have ever seen in a syllabus, and also the most dangerous year in which to cast a musical.

My own eighth-grade woodshop project was a birdhouse. It had a roof, a perch and an entrance too small for any bird. My mother still has it, in her garage, under a tarp, and every Thanksgiving she offers to bring it out. Buckley's alumni get a wall. I get an annual threat.