Upon a Hill

We will do our best to earn this.

An acceptance from a school is less of an achievement than a promise. What is going to matter is not the ink on the diploma, but the sweat it takes to get it.

I know that we are rather fortunate. That even though we had a great group of friends pulling as hard as they could, that we had to catch a couple of breaks to get in. Sometimes, but not very often, you get lucky. We will not take for granted that we made it, because there will be times ahead when the luck breaks the other way.

There are going to be challenges with our boys since, like all, if they arrived at a school fully formed they would not need to go to it. We will dig deep.

Elementary school was a challenge for me.

It is strange to look back at your youth, and see it not through the eyes of a child but the ones of a father. I realize now that because elementary school was such a challenge for me that how much my father had to try to help my school. He gave his all into my education at a time when other dads were more interested in the sidelines. An education is a journey shared, and we will do our best to do the heavy lifting.

There is a book that talks about the languages of love. It is about couples, but what I have learned through this process is about the language of love from fathers to sons. This language has fewer words than some, but comes with broader shoulders and higher hopes. I thought the best way to honor my father was to name our first born son after him, but what I realize now is that the best way is to teach my own son that language.

We will do our best to earn this.

After I graduated from elementary school, I had to repeat a grade and was sent to a boarding school in Western Massachusetts. The school was an athletic one (which is really not the direction I needed to go), and it even had its own ski slope. The fall term was about soccer season, and everyone was sorted. The varsity got to practice at the top of the hill near the dorms, the jv was at the middle, and the intermediate team was at the bottom. I was once again placed on the intermediate team, which came as no surprise.

The thing is I really love hot water, and the only way that I was going to get a hot shower was to run up the hill and try to beat the much better athletes, the jv and the varsity, to the dorms. Sometimes when you are sent to the bottom of the hill it means that you are just going to have to run twice as strong. For me it was not just the start of learning how to run, but the beginning of learning how to strive. And while it took a high school for me finally to get my act together, during that brisk New England autumn I still showered rather well.

We have been given a great gift of a school upon a hill. It is a beautiful place with the great resources of wonderful teachers, phenomenal music, a stem lab, a garden, and so much more. I know that we need to hustle to take advantage of the wonders of Cathedral. My sons will have what is for them their own warm water, and they will learn to run hills to get it.

So begins our journey.