DL had a gift for metaphor, as well. His sermons were legendary, and he named his school for boys Mount Hermon, after its namesake in the Holy Land (now on the disputed Israel-Syria border) that traditionally has been considered the Mount of the Transfiguration. Not a bad image for a school that took in local boys with promise, but almost no money, educated them, and set them to work on the school farm, kitchen, and buildings. He sent them off at commencement with the adjuration to give back to the world at least as much as they’d been given.

In its early years, Mount Hermon graduated, among many others, a young native American who was in the first party to climb Denali, and a South African native who was the founder of the African National Congress. In later years, Mount Hermon and its sister school, Northfield (now combined on one campus as Northfield Mount Hermon) gave the world Bette Davis ‘27, Lawrence Ferlinghetti ‘37, David Hartman ‘52, Edward Said and Ambassador J. Stapleton Roy ‘53s (classmates of mine), Natalie Cole ‘68, Laura Linney ‘82. and Uma Thurman ‘88. Frank Shorter and I ran on the same cross-country team, but he ran twelve years later and light-years faster.

The combining of the two campuses on one (a cause of great distress to many of the alumnae of Northfield) has given rise to many new buildings and facilities on this one. My classmates and I are staying in one of two new “cottages” built to house 28 students and three faculty families each. Energy conservation is a major theme here these days, so our rooms, as of old, are not air-conditioned. Those of us who’ve been here before for reunions have brought fans. The rooms, though brand-new, are just as I remember them from almost 60 years ago. They’re small, spartan, and furnished with the minimum of items necessary for student life: two desks and chairs, two small bureaus, two cots that can be stacked, two tiny cubbies for hanging clothes. New England puritan – everything you need, nothing you don’t. Built to last. Down across the football field, a magnificent new arts center is nearing completion. Its carillon, moved across the river from the girls’ school, will be dedicated today.

Early this morning I took a quiet walk to some of my old haunts – Shadow Lake, a eutrophic tarn haunted by mosquitoes; the little stream under the entrance road where my roommate and I caught native brook trout; the windows of my first room, in the attic of a faculty house, where the pinup on my wall was a painting of the car of my dreams, a 1950 Jaguar XK120; my second and third rooms in a large dormitory; and the first half-mile of the old cross-country course, which climbed steeply, and quickly sorted the sheep from the goats. I returned for breakfast with Mother, my shoes soaked with dew and my mood steeped in a nostalgia that lingered for hours.

DL Moody, raised in poverty and “farmed out” by his widowed mother, who couldn’t feed all her kids, came to believe in education of “head, heart, and hands.” Besides classes, each student was expected to put in at least ten hours a week in a campus job. Most of us started on the farm or in the laundry or kitchen. My first year, I picked and graded apples, shoveled manure, cleaned cows’ tails, killed and defeathered chickens, and leveled silage that blew in through a chute far over my head and trickled into my neck and sleeves as I tried to keep from being buried. As a Junior, I scrubbed the swimming pool and showers; and in my last year, mopped the chapel and, like Tarzan leaping into space on a vine, rang the big bell for Sunday services. Sitting here, I looked up at the steeple and wondered if I could still do it. Luckily, the chapel doors were locked.

All of that is long ago now, and far away. My classmates and I, most of us still readily recognizable after all these years, are dusted with the talcum of time and rusted in the joints by arthritis. But we – all of us, both men and women – share the mystique of the place that was and still is Northfield, and most of us the impulse to give back, as we were told to do. And we sing! Somewhere in the mists of time a tradition of choral singing began here. It may have been because that was one of the few ways for the boys and girls to get together. However it was, the tradition continues, with an annual Sacred Concert, Christmas Vespers, performances all over, and an alumni hymn sing each year, of hymns by now so familiar I rarely have to check the hymnal for the words. There are other alumni here, both older and younger; but we’ve all shared a unique experience here that unites us wherever and whenever we meet anywhere in the world.

We closed the hymn sing last night with the William Blake poem that’s been adapted as the school hymn and been sung here at least as long as I can remember. It ends: “I will not cease from mental fight; nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have built Jerusalem in ev’ry green and pleasant land.” It’s that vision, of a new Jerusalem, that’s kept us going all these years.