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4 5 T R E V O R D AY S C H O O L n FALL 20 1 7 – 2 0 1 8 John Freeman Gill '80 Author T h e Day School of my youth— Kindergarten in 1971 to 8th grade in 1980—was an unruly incubator of all things creative. It was no conservatory; it was a young school, figuring things out as it went along, just as we students were, but it allowed those of us with artistic temperaments to operate just this side of bedlam. When the teachers weren't around after school, we waged epic battles with Cuisenaire Rods in the back gym— rainbow volleys of these mathematical projectiles filling the air like the arrows of medieval archers. But we also wrote stories, performed our own plays, and made inventive uniforms for field day teams with oddball names like the Chic Sheiks. In 5th grade, I spent an awful lot of time contemplating Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth's oil painting of a young woman crawling up a grassy hill toward a house and barn in the distance. My intimate acquaintance with the painting had nothing at all to do with any precocious appreciation for art. It was simply that a reproduction of the image hung in the anteroom to the principal's office, where I regularly found myself cooling my heels after being tossed from class for being disruptive. After I entered the Upper School the following year, however, several wonderful A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gargoyle teachers helped me channel my restlessness into more constructive pursuits. Eric Lindow, an irreverent science teacher blessed with a beautiful singing voice and an inspired sense of the silly, invented a brilliant teaching mechanism for creative miscreants like me. Called e Punishment Book, it was a great big tome of blank pages into which malefactors were compelled to write entries of their own devising. Over time, the volume developed into an entertaining anthology of stories, poems, and rants penned by those students who never quite got comfortable doing what the world expected of us. Perversely, I prided myself on becoming e Punishment Book's most prolific contributor. Whenever possible, I contrived minor infractions that would allow me to write another shaggy-dog story or add another howling stanza to the book's growing kennel of doggerel. e Punishment Book has a cameo in my first novel, e Gargoyle Hunters, which was published this year by Knopf. Set in the vividly crumbling Manhattan of 1974–1975, the novel follows 13-year-old Griffin Watts, a troublemaking innocent who attends a fictionalized version of e Day School. Caught between warring parents in the aftermath of a difficult divorce, Griffin is recruited into his estranged father's illicit and dangerous architectural salvage business. Small and nimble, the boy is tasked with climbing around the tops of iconic skyscrapers and 19th-century tenements to steal exuberantly expressive architectural sculptures— gargoyles—right off their facades. But Griffin seems to be a nascent writer, too. No matter how many times he revises his entries in e Punishment Book, he is never quite satisfied with them. "I wrote mine in pencil," Griffin recalls, "returning often to erase and rewrite, erase and rewrite. For me, nothing was ever finished." It's hard to know what makes a writer, what combination of curiosity, nettling dissatisfaction, and love of language shapes a child into someone who has no choice but to express his experience of life through the written word. But e Day School was certainly a good place to discover the richness and beauty of language. I learned most of my English grammar through studying Latin with the charmingly eccentric Left: John on the cover of e Day School brochure for the 1974–75 academic year. e picture was taken during a spring school trip to Putney, VT, when John was in 2nd grade. Above: e cover of e Gargoyle Hunters, published by Alfred A. Knopf, to rave reviews.