I Remember These Things
By Tommy Robertshaw ’10
T
here’s no accounting for the
things wound up in memory’s
web. Sometimes, most often
in the morning when my brain is
up but my eyes not yet open, long-
off images unspool themselves and
surprise me with visits from those
earliest days of learning—those
lilting days spent in a red brick
fortress, curling spiral staircases up
and down in a line of blue blazers and
khaki pants. Ten years of memories
at 12 East 89th Street, New York,
NY 10128.
The address is a good example.
One of the first things I ever learned
to write down, its letters and numbers
still are etched into the ear of my
mind like a mantra. I remember all
of my 37 classmates’ names—many
of their middle names, too—and
can hear them recited in their own
voices, suspended in a whistling pre-
pubescent treble. The words to our
Tartuffe in Moliere’s “Tartuffe”
prayer at lunchtime tumble into my
thoughts before meals at long tables
and when I occasionally wake in time for sunrise, I’ll hear myself hum the tune to “Morning Has Broken,” a favorite Chapel
hymn. The Upper School dining room smelled like yeast, didn’t it, like those squishy bread rolls we were always eating, like
Muenster bagels; and the Eighth Grade hallway like power, refinement, and Ms. Iannicelli’s perfume.
All these things I remember happily. But there are other memories looping around up there that aren’t so nice. That prick at
me, even now. To describe the category these usually fall into, I’ll borrow a term from the great humanist George Saunders:
failures of kindness. Moments when I could have helped but chose to hurt—when I might have soothed but instead, I
snickered—when, so many times, I cleaved myself from that most important Saint David’s signpost of good manners: respect.
So, I was glad when I read Dr. O’Halloran’s letter announcing respect as the year’s theme. It’s what we need most of all at
“I knew then as well as I do now that I’m gay. But it would be
another six long years before anybody else did.”
a time like this, I thought, when suspicion and resentment fill the spaces between words of disagreement. When the hardest
gift for any of us to give each other seems to be the benefit of the doubt.
For the last 10 years or so, I’ve passed many of my happier hours making theatre. Even when I hate it, I love it: the challenge
of getting a hold on the slippery truth of our lives; feeling electrically bound to another actor; the cleansing rush of what
Robert Frost calls “a momentary stay against confusion;” and—I’ll be the second or third to admit it—the spine-tingling thrill
of applause. As with the rest of my sensibilities, this love began at Saint David’s. (Suddenly I can hear the pipe organ chords
of our Alma Mater: “All that we can be, all that we will be, all we are, began i-in thee-ee.” Anyone remember the Latin?)
Seventh Grade. Mr. Kilkeary. Sophocles’ Antigone. I played King Creon, the character left by play’s end with a pile of
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