April 17, 2012
I spent the latter half of Easter week with more than 10,000 Catholic school educators up in Boston at the Annual Convention and Expo of the National Catholic Educational Association. I'm told that NCEA is the largest non-public school teachers' group in the world.
Since it was my first time in Bean Town I chose to stay an extra day to see some of the sights. It turned out that chief among them was a huge number of runners gathering for the Boston Marathon to be held today, Patriot Day, in what is likely to be record heat. 26.2 miles at near 90 degrees? No thanks, but that's another story.
I visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts on Saturday morning. By midafternoon, worn out from the richness and size of the galleries and book guy that I am, I was browsing the shelves in the Museum Store when I spied a book titled simply Falcon. Of course I had to buy it and had it half finished before touching down at BWI.
The book set me to thinking about our school mascot. I guess we might just as easily have been Lions or Cavaliers, Ironmen or Gaels, Mustangs or Hornets. But someone, I'm guessing it was one of the Xaverian Brothers (perhaps our first principal, Br. Mark?), settled on Falcons.
I learned much that makes me believe the bird is an especially apt choice to inspire our athletes and make them proud. Falcons are powerful, intelligent, beautiful, charismatic, resilient, highly trainable, sought after, and simply the fastest animals alive. Sounds like a lot of our teams and athletes.
I'm placing the book in the school library and hope some students might give it a try.
We're always proud to be the Falcons.
