(11/2002) - I have but three weeks left at Cranbrook, yet there are an alarming number of things I have never done in my four years here. For example, I have never:

• Climbed the dinosaur outside the Science Institute

• Canoed across Kingswood Lake

• Seen a play at the Greek Theatre

• Served a detention

• Figured out what Chicken Tetrazzini is, or why I would want to eat it.

It seems that I had better get busy if I want to get all this done before I leave, so I can tell myself that I have had the full Cranbrook Experience. I will make sure that I have soaked it all up, so that when I am far away or when I get lonely, I’ll take out my photographs and journals and remember exactly how these four years felt.

But even if I skipped every class from now until the end of the year to go frolicking and exploring, I could never see all of Cranbrook. And surely I would understand even less. I will walk past the Art Academy and only pretend to understand their latest projects. I’ll never know why the Cranbrook transportation vans always smell like pickles. I’ll never bowl a perfect game on the Kingswood Lanes or really center a pot in ceramics.

Cranbrook taught me many things, but one of her grandest lessons has been humbling: the more I know about someone or someplace, the more I realize how much I have to learn. A good education leaves much to be desired, and in these last weeks, all I want to do is talk to good people and make sense of it all. But along with realizing how much I still have to learn, it is reassuring to know that there will always be something left to discover.

The summer before my freshman year, I decided I would sit down and write a story about boarding school, before my imagination became jaded with reality. The summer after my freshman year, I vowed to write that story about boarding school, the one I had never gotten around to writing, now that I was properly jaded with reality and could do justice to the experience. And here it is, nearly summer after after my senior year, and I have yet to write that story, because I know that I can’t do justice to the experience. Sledding down the boathouse stairs, a busload of girls singing along with Boyz II Men, secret passageways and hidden doors, or even the nights spent staring at the plywood bunk above me – how do I describe those moments in time?

I’m hoping the answer is that I go away, think about it, and then sit down and write about this little corner of the world that Cranbrook let me discover. Because as much as I want to call Cranbrook my own, I know that it’s not. But for a little while, she took me in and let me walk around, even if she never told me all her secrets.