School portraits / School life
Buckley keeps your choice after you change your mind
A favorite animal, a cartoon, or a team logo has to survive the person you become.
Suppose you have to pick something that will last, while you are still changing your mind about everything. This month the favorite animal is a shark. A cartoon character would make your friends laugh, until they grow out of it. A team logo feels official until the season ends. By June, any of these can look like a decision you made with total confidence and no foresight.
At the Buckley School in New York, every boy carves a plaque before he graduates. It is eight inches on each side. His name has to be on it, along with the years he was a student. He chooses the rest. That is the part that can age badly. Boys carve symbols and logos, sailboats and animals, and plenty of other designs. Almost three thousand of the plaques are on the walls. The oldest go back to 1917, the year of the school's first graduation.
Parents cannot keep every piece of childhood work. A drawing stays on the refrigerator until someone needs the space. A poster comes down when the room is painted. Nobody walks you into the basement years later and asks you to defend a dinosaur. At home, you can outgrow the shark and never see it again. I think that is one of the kinder rules of family life.
When alumni come back, they often look along the walls for their own plaque. If the choice was the shark, you are standing beside it in a good coat while a classmate grins. You can say you liked sharks. You did. Nobody is owed a speech. A grin is annoying and survivable.