Commencement Was Yesterday

I left home for keeps at 17, when I packed up my poetry books and my dorky bike and headed for college. We drove west on old Route 2 in that car that smelled like dog no matter how often we  tried to clean it. ‘Who will ever accept me the way my family did?’ I worried on that trip, ‘me with my obsessive list-making and my line of meaningless chatter like a monkey’s?’

Then we arrived and here was my roommate from Aspen Colorado, blond and blunt and athletic. “Man, you’re Catholic?" was the first thing she said to me with high amusement. "I never met a real Catholic before!”

I felt awkward for.... oh, at least an hour on that long dark hallway our rooms lay along. But then other freshmen began opening the doors to their rooms, all our families having left gone by then and didn’t we all have our favorite pillows and our homely slippers, even the same nature posters with that legend “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World” printed along the bottom. By the end of that first day freshman year I had six new friends. And by the first day of sophomore year I couldn’t wait to get back to campus, a feeling that kept multiplying exponentially with each passing year.

Then, almost overnight it seemed, we graduated and joined the long line of alums.

I missed our 5^th reunion but went back for my 10th, and for every reunion thereafter and loved every one.  I kept meeting these wonderful open people I had not known as an undergraduate and it was all utterly great. What was even greater was coming  back on ordinary days, when I was passing through Northampton MA on a business trip, say, or coming to attend a lecture or two-day symposium, or, best times of all, coming to see Annie Marotta and Susan De Young, our two daughters, one 'real' and one honorary, who graduated the last year the amazing Ruth Simmons was President there at Smith. I remember how Ruth - we all called her just ‘Ruth’, the way Moses is just called Moses - left the podium and came to the front of the stage at Commencement exercises and held out her arms in this cherishing gesture while the whole class of 2001 clapped and hollered and stamped for her.

I adored my time at Smith and I adored every inch of its beautiful campus. The love of my life and I decided we would marry while standing on this red bridge by the athletic fields.

Then, two whole decades later, I brought four of our kids back to see the place, little thinking that Annie and Susan would one day go to school here; little thinking that Carrie, in the background, would do a Summer Science program here. Michael our youngest would have gone to school here himself if he weren’t a boy.

Anyway, this is all of us at that red bridge. Susie was the one taking the picture so she isn't in it. And this below is a short video that to me shows why the school is still so great. Commencement was yesterday and all day my thoughts were travelling westward along old Route 2, just as I had done that first time long ago.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNh4FFpwFjI&feature=relmfu]

Thanks From a Seventh Grade Class

This is the sweet letter I just got from a 7^th grade class from Arkansas whom our honorary son Gary brought to Boston and New York for an extended field trip – a really extended six-day, Iron Man kind of field trip and how he found the vision and the energy to plan it I don’t know.

Here in the Boston area he took the kids out on the Freedom Trail, to the Kennedy Museum, to Concord and Lexington, to the Boston Common, to Atwood's Tavern to hear artist/author Matt Tavares talk on the making of his book Lady Liberty, to tour Phillips Andover AND Harvard AND Yale before it was on to Manhattan for more sites and sounds beyond my ken.

Ah but I was the lucky one: I was their first ‘presenter.’ As soon as they’d dropped their bags in their hotel rooms they gathered to hear my talk. I gave each student a copy of my very first book I Thought He Was a Speed Bump, a read-‘em-in-any-order account of life with small children and chock full of the great things little children say, with chapter titles such as “When Will DAD Become a Woman?” and “I’m Not Naked, I’m Wearing My Penis!”

My talk was about how anyone can write if they can get to that joyous state where everything seems cool and interesting. I thought the story Kaela mentions here about the hamster and the two photos would work well for opening with and so had the pictures blown up big and stuck on foamcore and weren’t they a darling audience as they looked and listened and laughed. I’m not exactly sure where the little originals of those two pictures are but I’ll see if I can put my hands on them and post them tonight.

In the meantime here at the bottom is a Christmas Day '07 picture...

...of their teacher, Mr. Gary De Young, who came into our family in 7^th grade and more than any other kid hangin' around this place kept me company making the dinner. He’s also smart, that Gary: he was asked to give the big Honors Day address on graduating from UMass Amherst some six or seven year ago; AND so universally beloved by the women of my alma mater, nearby awesome Smith College, that at Commencement, which by the way was the last Commencement of our wonderful then-President Ruth Simmons, he got cheered as much as anyone by the 500-plus members of that graduating class.

So here’s to you, Gar. And as for you, sweet Kaela, I would LOVE to come down to your school in the Delta anytime - just invite me - and I’ll bring 30 copies of my second book Vacationing in My Driveway, just as sweet and funny as Speed Bump and together we’ll all try to get into that same joyous state where everything seems cool and interesting. Because I’m pretty sure that’s where God wants us to be, every single day, enjoying this world and feeling grateful.