Baby I'm Amazed

Pretty soon I’ll be sleeping on the roof, this place is getting so crowded: Besides the two who moved in back in March we now also have Susan her husband Kevin and their wide-eyed baby Peter. (Does he even HAVE eyelids? His dad says he keeps wanting to narrate his movements as he struggles to pick up his own toes let’s say. He has him  saying to himself “I know I can do this if I can just open my eyes a little wider!” ) Susie, or Sooz, as her pals call her, did some of her growing up right in this house. She was in Sixth Grade when she became another honorary kid around here, coming here most days after school, starting her homework, sometimes having a little pre-supper meal.And every Thursday night she slept over, right next to my girl Annie in Annie’s big queen-size bed. They fit just fine, though I do remember the morning Annie appeared in the kitchen ahead of Susie. She came in smiling and shaking her head and finally told me why: "She keeps finding MY hair in her sleep and tucking it behind HER ear! I’m out cold and suddenly my head gets yanked over to one side!”This was an easy mistake for Susie to make since Annie's hair was pretty long then,The two were best friends right on through senior year and even went to the very same college together, where one tore up the Rugby field and the other practically scoured the very language right off the Amendments to the Constitution so hard did she study them and all their thorny implications. They graduated from Smith College together ten years ago and are going back today for their reunion.Last May, when I was on that same campus for my own reunion, I am recalling that the Commencement Day speaker was Rachel Maddow with that mind of hers as sharp as a deli-meat guillotine. I love going back to that campus, where I will be before 9 am tomorrow. MY job besides walking around in in my usual haze of general admiration for my school? To look after this little guy tonight, while Kevin and Sooz and Sooz’s best pal Annie join some old pals and kick up their heels on the campus where my long-gone mom, and then I myself, and then the two of them learned so much and had such dandy fun.It's enough to make anyone smile. :-)

 

March When It's Time to March

Why do people come back for their reunions, in some cases from around the country, in some cases from around the globe? Not because they’re looking that great or setting the world on fire usually. I think they come for those late-night conversations.At my Smith reunion this past weekend we had all the human drama you’ll find among people anywhere: cancers conquered and cancers fought to a standstill; pain on rising and pain on going to bed, no matter HOW many time a week we go to the Y. We had here and there a ripening cataract; here and there a worn-out hip. But our hip replacement girl is back dancing  and our future cataract patient will still be running a whole corner of her state.  One of us hoisted a bike out of her car single-handedly and rode all over campus, just like she did at 19. And this one with the long hair above left is a golf pro at 61.We were college kids in a time of war and assassination, and last winter when ten of us  got on the phone to dream up slogans for our class signs we thought a lot about that: the pain our country was in back then what with deaths from war and protest and assassination. But we thought too about what rose up in so many young people as as a result, which I would call a readiness to stand with the excluded and help make a place for them. Yesterday at the Alumnae Parade someone from a younger class saw us approaching with our signs and our outfits and called to her pals, “Here come the hippies!”Hippies? Aren’t we  doctors and lawyers, artists and actors and scientists, designers of laws and landscapes and buildings? Parents, some of us, and even grandparents? Hippies, never. No Hippie ever studied the way a Smith girl studies.Now if you have the time watch Rachel Maddow talking last Sunday to our newest graduates; then, for a real nice chill up the backbone read this real short excerpt from her speech that day. I believe I'll sit down then and memorize it.

In the big picture, standing at the age you are now at graduation, looking for your own deep-water horizon, consider the possibility that you might very well get old - everybody hopes you do. Be part of good decisions because the stuff you do now you will want to be bragging about when you become 90.How do you become part of good decisions in the absence of a crystal ball? The best way is to get smart and get smart fast, to take the opportunities you've got very seriously, to continue your education not necessarily in a grad school way, but in a lifelong way, be intellectually and morally rigorous in your own decision-making and expect that the important people in your life do the same if they want to stay important to you.Gunning not just for personal triumph for yourself, but for durable achievement to be proud of for life is the difference between winning things and leadership; it's the difference between nationalism and patriotism; it's the difference between running for office and devoting yourself to public service; it's agreeing that you're part of something; taking as your baseline that you will not seek to reach your own goals by stepping on your community; it means coming to terms that your country needs you…”

So I say: march when it's time to march.....

and dance when it's time to dance.