Loon - Jack McLean [5]
Summit Junior High School did not have an official seal.
I was to struggle badly during my first year and was forced to repeat it. Consequently, for the next five years, I would see the headmaster and the dean of students in the same two chairs at exactly the same place twice a week at each all-school assembly. They had their act down. I didn’t sense that they were as curious about us as we were about them.
The headmaster spoke, reinforcing the gravity of our mission.
“You are tomorrow’s leaders today,” he began.
The school mottoes were put forth—finis origine pendet (the end depends upon the beginning) and non sibi (not for self). Fortunately, my parents had decided that I would take Latin. Apparently, it would be needed.
Then the dean of students spoke. “You will adhere to a strict set of rules.”
One of his favorite rules was “abjure the hypotenuse” (stay on the paved paths; don’t cut across the grass). “Abjure”? My vocabulary was going to need work. This was a serious place.
Socially, I adapted well to Andover. We wore jackets and ties, attended chapel every morning, and lived in dormitories. There were no parents. I liked the structure and, as it turned out, the discipline as well. It was a place of history, purpose, and tradition.
Coming as I did from a rigid, conservative upbringing, I responded well to history, purpose, and tradition. My parents knew that Andover would reinforce this in me as it had done for generations of boys before me.
They couldn’t imagine at the time that this same reasoning would lead me to enlist in the United States Marine Corps five years later.
3
THE YEAR WAS 1966.
The old Victorian house was silent.
Home from Andover near the end of spring break, I was more accustomed to the raucous activity of a dormitory. Outside, a bus ground its gears up High Street, the sound muted by heavy storm windows and thick rhododendron bushes. The late-afternoon air was cold with not even a hint of the spring to come. Dark clouds coursed across the winter sky. Inside, the once glowing embers were slowly dying in the parlor fireplace. The occasional hissing and clanging of the radiators had ceased.
I was alone.
The occasional moments of quiet that I felt in the big house could be disconcerting. My family had moved from New Jersey to Brookline, Massachusetts, the previous year. I had never really spent time in this house except during vacations and weekend stopovers. Consequently, there were neither real memories—fond or otherwise—nor old neighbors eager to catch a glimpse of my rare visit home.
On the front hall table sat the day’s mail, carefully deposited in the gold tray by my mother. As was her custom, she had picked up the pile from the vestibule floor below the front door mail slot, taken that which applied to her, and left the balance for my sister, my father, and me to sort through. At the top of the tidy stack was a letter addressed to me.
I stopped.
Two things immediately and simultaneously caught my eye—the origin of the letter was the office of admissions at Colby College, and the envelope was thin.
I was about to commence the spring term of my senior year. I was taking five courses and was in serious danger of passing only two. It had been an exceptionally rigorous five years for me at Andover. College admission was a concern but was darkly overshadowed by the prospect that I might not even graduate from high school. I had passively applied to five colleges, had already been rejected by four, and was now waiting fatalistically for the last. It appeared that moment was nigh.
Acceptance letters came in fat envelopes.
Everyone agreed that I was a bright boy. When I was ten, I could instantly recompute a baseball average with each at bat but was somehow unable to translate such talent