The phrase "baggage train" kept popping into my thoughts this weekend as we packed up the contents of my daughter's dorm room in New Hampshire, a wagon train on the full scale of Napoleon's Grande Armee as it retreated in haste from Moscow: carboard cartons, shoeboxes, duffels, garbage bags, and bedding, with stray graduation-congratulations greeting cards and loose-leaf notes from Capitalism and Its Critics history class escaping on the balmy spring breeze and having to be chased down Front Street, Exeter, captured like butterflies, and stuffed into the crevices of the car.
My column today may be a bit incoherently scattered because I'm officially three days behind on work, and a bit frantic, having taken an unaccustomed four-night break to watch and clap as my daughter and her friends ran — laughing and crying at intervals as only a dramatic 17-year-old-can cry — through the gauntlet of confetti and handshakes that leads from childhood to the cusp of adulthood, in June, in New England.
The clouds cleared and we baked in the sunshine wishing we'd had the foresight to attend the ceremony in a parental or grandparental Panama or Borsalino sun hat. The president of the class of 2025 gave an actually very moving speech about how it's human nature to try to stop the flow of time, but we cannot, and should use this moment, this pivot and pinnacle, to simply sit in our white plastic folding chairs and drink in the beauty of it all. The principal, Mr. Rawson, exhorted the graduates to find purpose in their lives by always remembering the school motto, "Non Sibi," not for self but for others.
After the last name was read at the podium (a boy named Zucker), and the group photographs taken with Principal Rawson and Dean Weatherspoon, the graduates lingered for an hour on the lawn in front of the Academy Building in a pressing crush of navy blazers and white lace sundresses, smoking Cohiba cigars. The cigars are traditional, and, obviously, a not-so-subtle class signifier among this group of academic killer-diller samurai warriors and future C.E.O.s.
They burned it down, these kids. There were two knock-down, drag-out parties on Sunday afternoon and evening, with spike ball in the backyard, a drinking game called Rage Cage, an enormous sheet cake decorated with the Exeter lion rampant at both of the big bashes, champagne bottles shaken and uncorked, buffet suppers of tacos and salmon, cocktail napkins printed with the logos of the elite educational institutions to which many of them will matriculate this fall, and, around 11 p.m. the arrival of no fewer than 10 police squad cars dispatched in response to reports of rowdiness and underage drinking. The kids ran into the woods and, apparently, hid in a basement. All as it should be.
By the time they had returned from their hiding place in the woods and been collected by weary, sunburnt parents from the party house, it was nearly 2 a.m. I was back at the Exeter Inn, still trying to wrap up some layouts for the upcoming July issue of East magazine, sitting on the bed in my Indian cotton nightie with my computer when the unmistakable sound of my own beloved daughter crying super-loudly rose up to the open window of the third-floor room from the front of the hotel. I stuck my head out the window and asked why she was crying (fully aware that we were waking half the guests). "What do you mean?" she shouted up to me, outraged at the affronting idiocy of her mother. "Obviously I'm crying because I'm saying goodbye!"
In the morning, only a few hours later, I had to go door to door to figure out which room my daughter and Stella — her bestie from home, who had come north to be a prom date for one of the Exeter boys — were sleeping in. Maybe the most amusing moment in a weekend crammed with rich and bittersweet moments of joy and ridiculousness — crammed as dense with sweetness as the Exeter bar blondies they serve in Elm and Wetherell Dining Hall — was finding the dad of another grad as I came around a hallway corner on the second floor, knocking to wake his own son. "I have a meeting in Boston at 10," he said, "and the boys are flying out for Amsterdam on their graduation trip tonight."