1:1 Commencement Address

Uncle Wilbur has some insight on graduating from college.

1:1 Commencement Address

And so, I said to your aunt Natalie, “The hell you will!” and off we went, rolling down the hill, neither of us landing our punches as we went, though we tried, bouncing over rocks and tree roots. It was a mess, but by the time we reached the bottom we were too tired and banged up to continue. I gave her a quick kiss and we each retreated into our own corners of the house and nursed our wounds while we also nursed our first cocktails of the afternoon, gin and tonics with lots of lime juice and cubes of sugar plopped into the bottom of the glass for good measure. You see, we were sanguine. We knew the hippo family we’d sighted that morning would have moved on by now and that Thalen and Kennedy were due to the house any moment, if their jeep hadn’t broken down on the way, and that they’d bring tinned olives and candied ginger, that sort of thing. All of our frenzied activity that morning, not just the fight and our roll down the mountain, but everything we’d done the whole month before would show itself before long, in outcomes we’d come to rely on: good meals, near misses, money wired into accounts, and slim volumes of poetry sent to us in the mail by friends and supporters.

And THAT, my darling boy, is a good example of that piece of advice I stressed earlier, to have as many things lined up at the verge of ripeness as you can manage. Because life is like a Ferris wheel—what you add to it now, at the bottom, will be the thing that ends up at the top of the wheel later. It’s a circle.

But then, of course, there is also providence, the universe being tricky and interesting, so you can’t (and don’t have to) rely solely on your own planning. A pigeon can always land on your shoulder from the sky.

Case in point, later that day, when Thalen and Kennedy had arrived to join our merry crew at the summer house, and the sun had sunk pretty low in the sky, casting a golden glow over everything, the old black phone in the back hall rang loudly, making us all jump in our chairs. We’d forgotten we had a phone, I think! It hadn’t rung in four months. I ran down the hallway and snatched up the receiver. It was Merril, her voice faraway and metallic sounding, calling to tell us that we’d won the court case and could come home anytime.

We had won. We were absolved. We could keep our fortune. We could hold our heads up high in any town in America.

I don’t know what the right word for it is, but it’s a strange and rare feeling to know that you have prevailed, that justice is done and that your long exile in Zaire is over. Any day now you can pack up your things and get on an airplane and return to Chicago, your homey city on the lake. The strangeness I’m talking about is the time between when you learn your fate and the time you head out to meet it. Because until that departure, you can stay in what has been a kind of prison, but now look on it with completely new eyes! Everything that was just yesterday about survival and making do—the mosquito net covering the porch, the thin green blanket over the back of the sofa, the oil lamp and the half-wild brown dog that alerts you to people approaching the house—is suddenly imbued with nostalgia. Time slows when you know these are your last hours here. And that is how you felt last week maybe, as you looked around the campus and realized your own call from Merril had come. You were freed at the very moment you began to wish you could stop time and stay forever.

But you can’t stay at college forever. You have to start the next thing. Luckily, you’ve loaded up your Ferris wheel gondola these past four years with new friendships, that whirlwind romance with that girl from Missouri, all those hours of study, long walks crisscrossing a campus you’ve internalized by now, I’m sure. And those last gin and tonics before the phone rings will become like a platonic ideal. For the rest of your life, you’ll secretly think that you should tumble down a mountainside fighting with your wife before you retreat to the back of the house to sip a cold cocktail in the late afternoon, the air outside filled with the melodious chatter of the African pygmy-goose.

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Good grief.

This is Emily Writes Back, where this spring and summer I am writing and publishing a story a day (or nearly) as a fundraising stunt for Hospicare.