The Column at the Back of the Magazine

On a rainy Tuesday morning in early August, at a small maple kitchen table in a gray-shingled cape on Chestnut Street in Camden, Maine, a seventy-nine-year-old retired eighth-grade English teacher named Priscilla Weatherbee sits down with a mug of Red Rose, a blue Bic Round Stic, and a spiral-bound Ampad steno pad she bought at the Rite Aid on Elm Street three summers ago, and begins, in the small careful teacherly hand she has been writing in since 1965, the fall 2026 Class Notes column for the Class of 1968 in Bowdoin Magazine.

Outside, the rain is going straight down onto the hostas. Inside, a cat named Wendell — a rescue from the Camden-Rockport Animal Shelter, adopted in 2019, the year Priscilla's husband Charles moved to memory care — is asleep on the mail. Under Wendell, in a small orderly stack Priscilla keeps in a wire in-tray from L.L.Bean, are forty-three pieces of correspondence. Twenty-nine are handwritten cards. Nine are typed letters. Three are printouts of emails Priscilla asked her son Andrew to forward from her AOL account. Two are folded newspaper clippings. There is one obituary, cut carefully from the Portland Press Herald, of a classmate named William Thibodeau who died on the eleventh of June in Falmouth.

Priscilla lifts Wendell. She sorts the stack.

What the column is going to say

The column, when it prints in the September issue, will be seven hundred and forty words. It will run on page eighty-two of the magazine, between Class of 1967 and Class of 1969, under a small centered heading that reads 1968 in a serif font the college has been using since Priscilla was a sophomore.

In the seven hundred and forty words, Priscilla will report the following.

She will report that Bettina Charbonneau, who lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, has just become a first-time grandmother — to a girl named June, born the eighteenth of May, seven pounds four ounces, to Bettina's daughter Simone.

She will report that Whit Osterberg, retired from Merrill Lynch in 2011 and lately of Vero Beach, has been given a diagnosis of stage-two pancreatic cancer and has moved his winter address up to his son's house on the Vineyard so he can be closer to the family.

She will report that Ann-Louise Kendall — the class treasurer for eighteen years, twice a member of the Bowdoin Alumni Council, twice-widowed, now living in a small carriage house on the campus of a Quaker retirement community outside West Chester, Pennsylvania — has sold the last of the family land in Warren, Maine, this spring, and, in a note handwritten in a hand Priscilla has come to know very well, has said she is at last, at seventy-nine, thinking with real seriousness about a legacy gift.

She will report that Fitz Chamberlain has moved into memory care in Rowayton and that his wife Margery would appreciate cards.

She will report that Nan Trueblood's daughter Sarah — a 1994 graduate of the college — has, this June, been named president of a small teaching hospital in Roanoke.

She will report the death, on the eleventh of June, of William Thibodeau, and will note that the family has asked, in lieu of flowers, for gifts to be made to the college's Coastal Studies program, in honor of the summer of 1967, when Bill worked on Kent Island counting terns.

She will report six more moves, three more grandchildren, four more retirements, one very quiet divorce, and — in a final soft paragraph she has been drafting for three days — that she and Charles have decided, together, in the small careful way they still decide things when Priscilla brings the class binder to visit him on Sundays, that she will step down as class secretary at the reunion in the spring.

What it means, if anyone is reading

Somewhere on the second floor of Hubbard Hall in Brunswick, the fall issue of Bowdoin Magazine will land, on a Wednesday in September, in the inbox of a thirty-four-year-old associate director of gift planning named Miles Ashbrook, who will glance at the cover, drop the magazine on his desk, and open his laptop.

If Miles reads Priscilla's column that Wednesday afternoon — which will take him about eleven minutes, including a small pause to smile at the sentence about baby June — he will learn the following, at no cost, before his wealth-screen vendor's quarterly refresh runs, before the National Change of Address file reshuffles in October, and before the college's own database picks up a single one of the addresses Priscilla is about to hand him for free:

He will learn that Ann-Louise Kendall — a two-time member of the Alumni Council, a class treasurer, the daughter of a Warren farm family that has just liquidated its last acreage — is, at seventy-nine, at last thinking with real seriousness about a legacy gift. He will learn her new address in West Chester. He will learn the word legacy was in her hand. He will learn the season is spring.

He will learn that a longtime donor with a Vero Beach winter file has just moved his household forty degrees north to Chilmark because his son lives there and the cancer is not the kind that gets better. He will learn to change the address in the file this Wednesday, before the fall appeal drops on Monday, and before Whit Osterberg's daughter-in-law has to answer a letter from the college that was addressed to a house he will not see again.

He will learn that Bill Thibodeau's family has, in the plainest possible language, said that the college is the place they want the memorial gifts to go — and that the summer of 1967, and the small stone hut on Kent Island, and the terns, are what they want the gifts to remember. He will learn that a condolence card, this week, from the director of Coastal Studies, before the family's list closes on the twenty-first, will do more than a fall appeal will do in November.

He will learn that Priscilla is stepping down.

He will learn, in the eleven minutes, more than any dashboard on his second floor has told him all summer.

The pipeline you did not hire

There is a woman in Camden who is doing, for free, the reporting your development office cannot do at any price. She has been doing it since Jimmy Carter was in the White House. She has done it through Charles's diagnosis in 2019, and through the two winters after, when she still walked to the Camden Public Library to drop the manila envelope in the mail slot addressed to the magazine because she could not, in that season, bear to talk to anyone. She has done it because a class secretary is what she is, and because the college, in 1965, taught her that a promise like this one is not the kind of promise you set down.

She has done it because there are one hundred and forty-one people from a small college in Maine who are, at seventy-nine, still writing to her — in careful blue ink on Crane cards, and on the backs of Christmas photos, and on notecards embossed with the small sailboats of their summer places — because she is the one who asks, in a small mimeographed letter every June, what shall I write about you this year.

No one at the college has ever taken Priscilla to lunch.

No one at the college has ever called Priscilla, without a fundraising ask attached, to say thank you.

No one at the college has, in forty-eight years, sent Priscilla the small quiet handwritten card that would say — plainly, and with feeling — we know what you are doing back there, and it is the most important unpaid job in the alumni office, and we would like to buy you a lobster roll in Camden and take the drive up.

The column ships. The column arrives. The column, in ninety percent of alumni offices in this country, is not read by the one person on the staff whose job is to know what one hundred and forty-one aging alumni are doing this fall.

What Rōmy is doing about it

Rōmy does not write the column.

Rōmy does not lift Wendell off the mail. Rōmy does not sit at the maple table with a blue Bic and the small orderly stack of cards from Northampton and Vero Beach and West Chester. That work — the correspondence, the trust, the forty-eight years of it — is Priscilla's, and it is not, in any honest telling, work a piece of software is going to do.

What Rōmy does — quietly, on the Wednesday morning in September that the fall issue lands — is read the column for Miles. It reads it slowly. It underlines Ann-Louise. It flags legacy in Ann-Louise's own reported words. It notices that Whit's address has moved forty degrees of latitude. It notices Bill Thibodeau's obituary, cross-references the family's memorial preference, and drafts a note to the director of Coastal Studies, ready for a signature by lunch. It notices, very gently, that Priscilla has said — in the last soft paragraph — that she is stepping down.

And then it does the small quiet thing the alumni office has, in forty-eight years, not done. It puts Priscilla on the top of Miles's list for Thursday. Not as a prospect. As a person. With a suggested three-line note, in Miles's own voice, that says thank you, and asks whether she would let him drive up to Camden the second week in September, and whether she would let him buy her a lobster roll at Cappy's on Main Street, in the plain simple gratitude of a college that has, at last, noticed her.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, before the fall issues of your alumni magazines start landing, do one small unfashionable thing.

Find out who your class secretaries are. All of them. The Class of 1958, 1963, 1968, 1973 — all the way down to the class that graduated three Junes ago.

Pull the list. It will be shorter than you think. Fifty-eight people, maybe seventy. Almost all of them retired. Almost all of them unpaid. Almost all of them the single best-informed alumnus of their class about the whereabouts, the illnesses, the moves, the grandchildren, and the giving of the people who graduated the same June they did.

Now pick one — the one whose column you read last spring and lingered on for a minute longer than you meant to. Write her, this Thursday, a small handwritten card, on plain cream paper, in blue ink, that says nothing at all except that you have read her column for years, and that you know what she is quietly doing back there, and that you would like — if she is willing, and if it is not a bother, and only if it is not — to buy her a cup of coffee in her town this fall.

Do not attach an ask. Do not attach a case for support. Do not attach a QR code.

Attach, if anything, a small warm thank-you and the plain human sentence that a woman like Priscilla, in a gray-shingled cape on Chestnut Street in Camden, on a rainy Tuesday morning in early August, has been quietly waiting forty-eight years to receive.

The column is at the back of the magazine.

Turn to it. ♡