4000

Since the 100 of us who showed up in 1982 were the first class of what was then known as the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West (now just UWC-USA), we're the first class to celebrate a fortieth graduation anniversary, as we were the twentieth, the tenth, the fifth... Our anniversaries are the school's! Yet while we're happy to think of ourselves as pioneers, it remains puzzling that the school took class photos in black and white for its first three classes, making us look as old as the 19th century railroad hotel which is the anchor of the campus. We're not that old!

The thirty-seven classes which have graduated since then now fill the walls of a long and windy underground corridor, with nice big glossy images of proud graduates in formal or national dress. Forty classes makes four thousand graduates, as many as the years of living our class has accumulated since graduating. Or would have, if we had not lost four of our number (three to cancer, one to leukemia), some of the several dozen ex-students we named at a very moving gathering of memory this afternoon. Quite a community we started, not just international and intergenerational but including the dead as well as the living...

This reunion was for the classes of 1984 and 1985, 1994 and 1995 and 2004 and 2005; there wasn't room to host the class which graduated a decade ago. And we met few of the current students during this. What would we have said to them, the class which had nobody ahead of us to guide or constrain us way back then? But I was delighted to find this quilt portrait of them, enough color to balance our sepia!