<b>Chapel Talk by Ellie Manny</b>

My family moved from Philadelphia to Millbrook the summer before I started third grade. I was rather preoccupied with being eight years old at the time, and ‘New York’ was nothing more to me than a phrase thrown around on my father’s favorite bad-reception sports radio stations. We may as well have been moving to Nebraska, as far as I was concerned. The really important thing, of course, was that our new house was located within three football fields of a zoo. I don’t believe I realized until our arrival that this house was to be shared with forty-something teenaged boys as well as their favorite pizza-eating rodent friends. Yes, it was to Burton Hall, then known as New Dorm, that we moved. And it wasn’t until I was finishing fifth grade that we retreated to the relative calm and sanity of Abbott Hall. Of course, it was nothing like the shimmering palatial suites you all hold in such high regard; the renovation from crumbling plaster to spectacular grandeur didn’t take place until several summers later. During Abbott’s face-lift, my entire family moved into the health center for the three months between spring and fall terms. Although we escaped as frequently as possible, the experience remained—to put it quite delicately—rather invigorating.

Now, if I may move simultaneously forward and back, I would like to explain why I decided to ask Devin to introduce me. Growing up here, Devin was my frequent partner-in-crime. When I first met her, she was crouched outside of what was then her family’s home and now is mine, playing with a toad. Of course, we became allies straight away. Unified by our weird parents and irksome younger siblings, we embarked upon a series of scintillating adventures. Perhaps the most memorable was the gerbil colony. Mr. and Mrs. Hardy were either much cooler or much less wise than my parents, and so allowed Devin to keep several gerbils. Amid fits of childish pet-envy, I promptly moved into their house and joined Devin in the construction of several thousand miles of cardboard gerbil tunnels. Obviously, the little creatures were not particularly well-contained by this material. After multiplying to turn into roughly twenty-seven gerbils, they mostly escaped and went on to plague the Hardy household while Mr. and Mrs. Hardy, feet pulled up off the floor, were probably smacking their foreheads in unison. Devin and I went on to build multi-chambered snow forts, attempt to rescue an abandoned baby lamb, and invent the inspired and frankly quite dangerous sport of hammock boxing. We used to get all the faculty kids around in the summer—everyone from Arthur “That Arthur Kid” Anthony to Zandy “Moose” Zeiser and form a sort of Midget Mafia to play Ollie-Ollie-Oxen-Free, a game whose principle objective was to hide, then victoriously beat the sense out of Mrs. Casertano’s car without anyone noticing. Good times, those.

So, changing gears slightly—I’ve always been asked a lot of questions with regard to my status here at Millbrook. Perhaps the most enigmatic is also the most staggeringly popular: “So, what’s it like to be a facbrat?” Easily asked, and of course needlingly difficult to answer. I can only immediately think of one aspect of my personality that hasn’t been in some way influenced by my upbringing as a faculty child, and that’s my devotion to the Philadelphia Flyers. Almost all of my important childhood adventures took place here on campus. Being a facbrat—particularly one with a good sense of fun—put a zoo, acres of forest, a hockey rink, and occasional construction sites at my disposal. Boredom was rarely an issue. When I was about eleven, a cohort of mine borrowed a parachute from some faculty member and we spent and entire Saturday tying it crudely around our waists, letting it catch the wind, and bombing down Case Hill like sailboats gone childishly wrong. That winter, in the same location, the old Physics teacher built a twisting luge course from the top of the hill by the Littles’ house all the way down past the tennis courts, as part of a demonstration for his class. This, of course, was thrilling—until one of the walls wore down and I ended up wrapped laterally around a lamppost. The moral of these tales, however, and the simplest answer to that frequently-asked question, is that just as they say, it takes a whole village to raise a child. Living at Millbrook has kept me from isolation within my own household by providing me with countless teachers, several spare sets of parents and, once Nick became a freshman and got friends, four or five JV brothers.

Of course, like so many seemingly delightful situations, there have been drawbacks. Sometime around the first long weekend of my freshman year, it dawned on me that being a facbrat was no longer ‘cool’. In Guest House and between classes, my classmates discussed their plans for the coming weekend. “So what are you doing?” one would ask, and the other would reply, “Oh, you know. Heading down to the lost city of Atlantis.” “Sweet. South of France for me.” These conversations generally culminated with someone turning to me and saying, “So, Ellie, what will you be doing? Going home?” and then hacking with bursts of uninhibited laughter. This was hilarious to me about twice before the novelty wore off. Another downside to living where I go to school, as well as where my parents are employed, is having to deal with a constant peer feedback about “Mr. and Mrs. Manny”. For example, I am approached almost weekly by young William Kaufman, bearing an update on his opinion of my father. Generally it goes something like this: “Ellie, tell your dad he’s crazy!” “Very well, Kaufman Twin. Off I go.” “What? No, I’m only kidding. I like him. Really.” And we saunter on our separate ways. Complaints about my mother generally arrive in the form of Abbott girls asking me why she gave them early dorms. I always yearn to reply saying, “Because she is a demon from hell who wants to stunt your social growth as much as possible,” but I always stick to the more innocuous response that I don’t know. Usually it’s for some transgression of the rules governing energy conservation, and while the turn-off-your-lights-in-Abbott-rule is certainly well-intended, I must say it’s something like trying to bail out the Titanic with a shot glass. Since the renovation, Abbott’s hall lights have turned off only with the occasional power-outage.

This brings me to my final subject: campus alteration. Everyone here knows about the plans for expansion, improving what we do have and constructing what we don’t. I think it’s all great, though I do believe it would be in everyone’s best interest to go the extra mile and build a bit greener. As my time here comes to a close, however, I have begun to feel grateful that I will not have to wake up every morning in the future to find that a little bit more of my backyard has succumbed to the new Math/Science Center. Already I have watched as the perimeter of one of the new playing fields was laid out only a few yards away from the place where we buried my old dog, who was known to her more bitter enemies as Kujo, and as the field house took out the tree where some faculty kids before me had built a treehouse. I felt that something had been completely destroyed, something that belonged to me and to a few others who used to enjoy that space so differently. When I calm down and think about it, though, I realize that some new geography can’t really obliterate my memories. My past is still around as long as I can talk about it, or even just think about it.

So here’s the central message. When you grow up and have kids, try to give them a different childhood. Do something weird with your life, if only for their sake. Give them something interesting to talk about when they’re old enough to realize it. Start where my parents did and get rid of the TV, so that even if you live in the utter Doldrums of the world they have to do something creative. If my parents hadn’t taken that step, I might never have had any of the experiences I’ve just shared with you. I suppose I never really appreciated all the fun I had as a child until I was old enough to know better, because that’s just how kids are. Still, I am more grateful for my eclectic facbrat childhood, and the understanding of this campus that it gave me, than anything that I can think of. I know it’s not the coolest thing to really appreciate Millbrook as a high school, so try to look at it in a different way. Just think of it as a place in the world where you happen to be at this precise moment, and make the best of it. Do something unusual. Go see if we still have that old parachute I used, that could provide some unconventional and quite dangerous fun. One thing that my childhood taught me was to see things the way they are, not the way you’d rather have them. Do that, and I imagine you’ll have a much better time overall.