Head of School’s Notebook: Seniors
November 12, 2021
“Which of our actions have the most meaning?”
That’s the question Paige Rawiszer ’22 asked us all several weeks ago, remembering a chance encounter in the summer of 2018 with Brenda Martinez Ruiz ’21, which ultimately led to Paige coming to Cate. Could Brenda have known in that brief conversation that she was changing the course of a life?
It wasn’t easy, Paige admits, to realize her Brenda-inspired ambition. Paige was concerned about her parents not supporting the idea, so she filled out the parent portion of the Cate application herself. She must have done a heck of a job on it. Eventually, apparently, her parents warmed to the idea, and Paige’s new path stretched out before her.
But Cate, particularly at the beginning, was not the experience she imagined. “Cate is weird,” Paige said, with a smile on her face. It took her a bit of time to find herself in this new context. Said Paige, “I was trying too hard, if you can believe it.” When she understood that, everything changed. An entertaining roommate, three unfortunate goldfish, and a strangely empathetic dorm head helped as well. That’s life, Paige recalled, on this “bizarre, beautiful mountain.”
“I have no understanding of the way the universe works,” she said. “But every action contains the prospect of something better for someone somewhere.”
Aidan Carlander ’22, Paige’s classmate, was in the audience that day and he likely understood more than most just what Paige meant. His journey to Cate, which he shared last week, began in tragedy.
Aidan grew up very close to the Montgomery family and recounted a conversation with Mark Montgomery, father of Kate ’11, Caroline ’14, and Duffy ’16, during which Mark suggested that the only school Aidan should consider was Cate. Though Aidan grew up locally, his family moved to the Bay Area a few years prior, and his plans – which Mark took issue with – had Aidan headed to high school closer to his new home. Aidan was a 7th grader at the time and admits that he wasn’t sure how to respond to Mark’s ardor. “I laughed,” he said.
That was the last conversation Aidan had with Mark. Mark and Caroline were killed in the 2018 mudslides that ravaged Montecito following the Thomas Fire. Aidan came from San Francisco to attend Caroline’s memorial service and told his mother partway through the ceremony, “I need to go to Cate.”
There are few more horrifying moments or consequences than those that befell the Central Coast community on that January morning nearly four years ago. We felt it all again as Aidan spoke, many of us fighting back the emotions that so quickly overwhelmed us. Another member of Aidan and Paige’s class, Francesca Castellerin ’22, said in her Servons Speech at Family Weekend that she is grateful for her tears and for the outlet they offer, whether they are derived from joy or sadness. So we gave in to our feelings.
Even painful memories can be welcome, especially if they bring back to us people who matter in our lives. And we realized as we mourned again the loss of Caroline and Mark, that in their passing they brought us Aidan. Said he to conclude his remarks, perhaps to put an exclamation point on the importance of friends and teachers in our lives, “We are surrounded here by people who see something in us that even we can’t see in ourselves.”
Causation in the universe is indeed beyond our comprehension. There is no apparent rhyme or reason to it. “Bad things happen,” Paige and Francesca and Aidan all admit. But they aren’t the only things that happen. As John Endres ’22 noted in the week following Paige’s address, “There is so much more good than bad in the world. So much more hope than fear.”
I am mindful every moment of the wisdom our students derive from their journeys, how reliably they reveal the power of each others’ insight, and how artfully they render the experience of this place and the people who define it. There is no better encapsulation of who we are and what we do at Cate.
Servons, Seniors.