The mood was light at the Doyle Park picnic where the Maria Carrillo class of 1999 gathered Saturday to celebrate their 10-year reunion. In the days leading up to the event, students filled me in on the trials of opening a new school, but also the fun of exploring unchartered territory.

They had no idea who their rival was or really, what high school should be like. So they said they made it what they wanted (within reason, said founding Principal Pam Devlin).

On Saturday, Devlin was on hand to greet her former students and read a passage from Lillian Hellman's Pentimento. Here it is:

"Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented,' changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now. "