School portraits / Opening Day rituals
At Castilleja, the Senior Road Trip Is One Lap
A Palo Alto girls' school gives its seniors decorated cars on Opening Day and a destination they can see from the start line.
Castilleja's parent newsletter for August 2022 has a line I have reread more often than my own tax return: "Seniors! Start your engines! It's almost your turn to drive the Circle!"
The Circle is in the middle of campus. On Opening Day, the school explains, seniors decorate cars together and drive very slowly around its perimeter. That is the whole trip. Everyone cheers. The drive is one lap long, and the wait for it is six years.
The 2022 schedule read like a countdown. 8:00am sharp: the Tie Ceremony, on the Circle. Arrivals from 7:30. 8:15: grade-level parent meetings, with each grade sent somewhere specific, sixth grade to the Dining Room, eighth to the Pool Patio, eleventh to a place called Good Court. 9:00 to 10:00: the all-parent meeting in the Chapel Theater. 10:05: Seniors Drive the Circle.
Five minutes. The parents of seniors had five minutes to get from the Chapel Theater to the Circle, and I know exactly which one I would have been: the father still in the theater at 10:04, asking a question about the dinner dance.
The Tie Ceremony comes first, and it is the better idea. Eighth graders tie sixth graders' ties. Seniors tie freshmen's. There is a dash across the turf to find your buddy. A welcome speech can tell you that you belong; someone standing close enough to fix your collar has to actually do something about it.
I have tied a tie for my son exactly once, for a cousin's wedding, from behind, in a mirror, while saying "over, under, through" in a voice that frightened the dog. It came out eleven inches long. A Castilleja senior would have done it in the time it took me to find the mirror.
Then the cars. Decorated, full, going nowhere fast, which is a privilege that makes no sense to anyone who hasn't spent years watching older girls do it.
I understand it completely. My eldest got her learner's permit in March. We go to the Costco parking lot on Sunday mornings, and she drives around the outside of it at eight miles an hour while I hold the door handle and the dashboard and, once, the gearstick. The seniors drive in a circle, very slowly. My eldest has been doing that since March, without the applause.
Next August I am going to decorate the minivan. She says if I do, she is walking.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- History and traditions, Castilleja castilleja.org
- CastiNews August 12, 2022 castilleja.org
- Castilleja public parent and student reviews niche.com