Hill Weekend

Ah, yes, The Great Return. For those that don't know, Hill Weekend is essentially Homecoming for Lawrenceville, built around a day of all the sports teams competing against Lawrenceville's oldest rival: The Hill School. But let's be honest here--first year graduates posing in front of the Lawrenceville student body to get recognition is as big a part of Hill Weekend as anything is. My memories of Lawrenceville hosting Hill weekend involve sitting in the bleachers in front of the football game, but actually watching all of the graduates standing on the track that surrounds the field for the entire crowd to see. They were talking to each other, but their bodies were facing the stands. Think of how elementary schoolers act on stage during the second grade play, and you have an idea.

There was a bit of that this year, but Hill Weekend offered all of us returning graduates something more, something I had thought about while watching as a High Schooler, but hadn't really understood until I experienced it as a graduate. This weekend, most of us ignored everything non-Lawrenceville. It became more than just going back to high school. We were back in high school. All the graduates convened at the Pep Rally Friday night. This was where the hugs, the handshakes, the small talk, the "oh my god!"s and "you look great"s took place. But as the night wound down, the graduates fell into their Lawrenceville routine.
A group of kids went off to eat dinner at Fedora's, the restaurant across the street from Lawrenceville that is oh-so-frequented by its student body.
Most kids walked through campus, stopping at their old dorms, and talking with their old house masters.I went on one of these strolls with two friends who had prefected one of the Crescent houses, and within five minutes of greeting the House Master they were asking her for gossip.
And as I was leaving Lawrenceville on my way up to a party, I drove passed a group of graduates hopping over the Lawrenceville fence to get onto Main Street, just as they had done all of last year.

And the next day, of the forty-five or so returnees that arrived on Friday night, virtually all of us drove the two hours to Pottstown to see the games. I spent most of my time at the football game. I noticed very little of the graduate posing that I'd witnessed in previous years. Most of us were in the stands watching. Most of us cheered for a school that we were no longer a part of. And when Lawrenceville won, most of us there charged the field with everyone else and jumped in celebration with the massively forming huddle. I found myself more invested in this Hill football game than I had been in any during my time at Lawrenceville. Why? Why am I unusually excited for a school that, while good to me, has moved on without me, with players and fans who don't really know how to feel about us returning, who maybe feel like we're trespassing?

I think that Hill weekend became a second chance of sorts for us, a moment for us to evaluate our time at Lawrenceville and focus on what we cared about: friends, celebration, and ultimately, achievement. We were Lawrenceville students, but better Lawrenceville students--a little more excited, a little more unified, and looking back on the past few days I realize that to the graduates nothing else was relevant. I can't tell you how many times I heard someone say "I'm not going to think about how much work I have to do when I get back." Granted, maybe all these people mean to say is that the mental burden of worrying over homework would dampen the fun of the weekend. But that's not the only reason they don't want to think about their college work. There's something to it that's a little more profound. We do not want to think of college work because we do not want to think of college. In a way, we wouldn't let ourselves. The weekend had become about returning to being a high school student. We were in high school. The idea of college homework is anachronistic. We do not need to work on college things. Do not mention these things to me. Do not break our suspension of disbelief. Do not pull us out of our characters.

But I'm writing this on a Sunday night, and Hill Weekend, my friends, is over and done with. And the people that wouldn't let themselves think about college homework are now forced to. And they have gone back to wherever they were on Thursday and, in a weird way, they are leaving Lawrenceville for the second time. I was so comfortable this weekend, everything was so familiar, conversation was so relaxed and benign (and i don't mean that in a bad way. Who has a revelatory conversation every day of their lives?), that i was, I realize now, blind to the fact that I will probably only see most of those graduates a handful of times in the rest of my life.


And that. is that.