Late yesterday I learned that the space shuttle Endeavor blasted off for the last time yesterday. I knew its final lift-off was in the works, but hearing the news on the way home from Suzanne’s commencement was a fitting way to cap a day that was about endings and beginnings, about leaving the known for the unknown.
Today Suzanne graduates from college. Family and friends have gathered to wish her well, to celebrate her achievement and to send her off into this new time of her life. A phrase from the baccalaureate yesterday stays with me: We are who we are because we were here together.
I think about my own college friends — one of them my husband!— and how I treasure them more every year. I think also about my own college graduation. Once my parents arrived it was the beginning of the end.
Suzanne said as much to us yesterday. The real Wooster, the Wooster that has been changing and sustaining here these last four years — that ended a few days ago. So this weekend has been a long goodbye to the campus and the way of life she had here; to friends who (though she will stay close to many) will not be here, in this particular composition, again.
For us it is a goodbye to a place that seems tucked away in time and space. While Suzanne will undoubtedly return here we most likely never will. As of today, she is an alumna. We are just “the parents of.”
(The girls four years ago, after Suzanne’s high school baccalaureate.)
The horses this Derby aren’t up to speed, I’ve read. Foreigners (“furriners”?) have bought the best mares and sires and whisked them away. They are breeding now on other shores, their progeny are bypassing American tracks; they are racing in Europe and elsewhere.
I don’t compare times. When the horses pound the back stretch and round the final turn, they always seem fast to me. But I wonder if there is a collective failure of nerve, an unwillingness to take risks. I wonder if we’ve stopped looking for the bright eyed foal who can’t behave himself. If we are too enamored with ease.
We went to Indiana last weekend for a gathering of Tom’s family. And it was there, by the shores of a rain-water-swollen Lake Monroe, that we heard the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. We had just begun to realize that our cache of Scrabble letters was far more than the board (or our attention span) could use when we got a call telling us the news. Those of us with Blackberries and iPhones (this does not include me) found news sites were crashing from all the hits. So since the cottage has no television or wi-fi, we cranked up the radio in the old stereo receiver.
As we bent toward its sound, I felt we were drawn not only into a new, post-bin Laden era, but also into the past. We were like the people in “The King’s Speech” listening to George VI rallying his fellow citizens, minus the sonorous soaring of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU03byh6O1M
We strained to hear the scratchy sound coming out of the box, the narrow frequency fading in and out during the president’s brief announcement. We were startled from our lethargy, hungry for information, searching for a community in the airwaves.
Last night I went to an awards ceremony for a writing contest I’d helped to judge. I wanted to see the people who’d written the essays, to match face with voice. The winners were younger than I imagined they would be. One of them I’d thought was female (our entries were identified only with numbers) was actually male. Two of the three honorable mentions were married to each other.
As the evening progressed, back stories emerged. Enough of them that I knew we had picked the right winners. Enough of them that I knew we, the judges, were the real winners after all.
Today I heard on the radio that a Cambridge University scientist has declared April 11, 1954 the most boring day since 1900. This is based on a computer analysis of 300 million facts, according to an NPR interview with William Tunstall-Pedoe, the scientist who invented the search engine that sifted through the facts and arrived at this oddly compelling conclusion.
Listeners who’ve commented on the story have mostly offered personal evidence to refute it — usually their own birthdays or those of their loved ones. None of the comments convinced me that this day shouldn’t be one of those most boring in history.
If April 11, 1954 was so ho-hum and ordinary, then wasn’t it also the most wonderful day, too? No great people were born, but neither were there explosions, battles or mass murders. And aren’t the simple, uneventful days the most special?
In Abraham Vergehese’s book Cutting for Stone, the character Ghosh tells his son, Marion, “You know what’s given me the greatest pleasure in my life? It’s been our bungalow, the normalcy of it, the ordinariness of my waking, Almaz rattling in the kitchen, my work. My classes, my rounds with the senior students. Seeing you and Shiva at dinner, then going to sleep with my wife.” Ghosh, the overworked doctor at a poor hospital in Ethiopia, falls asleep every night with these words on his lips: “Another day in paradise.”
I hope that April 11, 2011 — like April 11, 1954 — is just another day in paradise.
Twenty-four years ago, in Lexington, Kentucky, it was snowing on this day. It had been an unseasonably warm March, but the weather changed when the new month blew in. And by April 4, our wedding day, it wasn’t just flurrying, it was snowing hard, drifting and accumulating, slowing traffic and obliterating spring.
We drove behind the plow on the way to the church, tiptoed through slush on our way to the reception. The snow left a delicate filigree on car windows, buried the daffodils and bent near to breaking the just-blooming dogwood trees. Friends from up north, expecting balmy breezes, braved the weather in light floral prints and big-brimmed hats. The day was a joyful blur of blossoms and snow flakes.
It was not what we’d planned or expected, and was therefore a good way to begin married life. More than two decades later, no one has ever forgotten our wedding day. We certainly haven’t!
Today my thoughts lie across the frosty Allegheny Mountains, hundreds of miles north and west of here to a small town in Ohio where a silly parade will step off at 5 p.m. Students in costumes and face paint, at least one mannequin head on a stick and several kilt-wearers with near frostbitten knees will be led by a bagpiper and an administrator dressed as a Tootsie Roll. The pipes will drone “Scotland the Brave” and the jolly band will weave its way through the College of Wooster campus.
The celebration is all part of I.S. Monday, the day Wooster students turn in the independent studies they’re worked on for months (in some cases years) and receive in exchange a Tootsie Roll and a parade. It seems like only a few months ago that Suzanne was writing us about all the excitement when she witnessed the festivities her first year in college; now it’s her fourth and final year — and she and her fellow ’11 classmates are the stars of the show.
A parade to honor academic achievement, what’s been described as “an academic Mardi Gras” — that’s an idea that appeals to me. To say nothing of the Tootsie Roll!
Photo Credit: The College of Wooster
This morning a line from the newspaper caught my eye. Reporting on the crisis in Libya and the improbable victory of “a ragtag team of thousands” that repelled government forces, the Washington Post quotes Suleiman Abdel, a surgeon and now a rebel, as saying this about Libyan leader Gaddafi: “He has the force, but we have the heart.”
I let that one sink in for a moment. I copied it down in my journal. Of all the story lines in all the novels, memoirs, movies, this is the most compelling. It is the story of the underdog, the one who succeeds against all odds. And sometimes it is a sad story, a tale of one who tries but fails. But it is always inspiring.
Once a year (at least!) I know I will stay up late on Sunday night, starting off the work week in a sleep deficit. Once a year I will listen to giddy stars telling us who designed their Size 0 gowns. But it will be worth it every year, too, because no matter how gaudy or self-involved or long they are, the Oscars are for me the original “must-see TV.”
They remind me of the days when there were three networks and the annual airing of “The Wizard of Oz” or Mary Martin’s “Peter Pan” dominated the television calendar. Yes, we were limited, so limited that we read books and made forts in the woods because there was little to keep us inside. But perhaps for that reason the movies seemed even more magical, and tuning in to the annual celebration in their honor became a habit.
In the weeks leading up to the awards ceremony I try to see as many “Best Picture” nominees as I can, a task made more difficult by last year’s decision to increase the number tapped from five to ten. Even though I came nowhere close to seeing them all, I still feel cinema-besotted from my efforts.
Last night’s Oscars ceremony was slightly shorter than usual and not as well hosted. But our favorites won, the “In Memoriam” reminded us who we have lost, and the dresses, well, the dresses are always divine.