Humans Graduate Every Year

But this year was my girl's turn! (and a poem to her class)

This is Emily Writes Back, for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins

On Wednesday our daughter graduated from high school!

In August, she’s off to Canada to attend university and study music performance (flute). I am so incredibly proud of her hard work, talent, beauty, and special qualities that are impossible to put into words. If I try, the words are like “stylish and cool,” and “reserved,” and “watchful” and “witty” and “attuned” and “unique.”

And I am filled with awe and gratitude at the large network of people who helped her and us get to this point—

all the music teachers
choral and band directors
park rangers
grandparents
aunts and aunt-like friends
uncles and guncles
farmers
state assemblywomen
garbage collectors
lifeguards
theater directors
and so on

who kept this town running, fostered her love of music, and kept this household afloat for the past 17 years.

This whole week was a whirlwind of occasion

We had a party in a park by the lake with gusts of wind that rattled the “Graduation” steamer and sent dozens of Canadian flags strung up along the edges of the pop-up tents to flapping and fluttering. We welcomed visiting relatives and friends from as far away as California and Georgia, and a picture perfect graduation ceremony where the cherry red caps and gowns popped against the football field green.

At the graduation, there were three speakers:

The high school principal, an earnest graduating senior named Caedmon, selected by his peers to speak, and a gym teacher. Caedmon’s eight-minute speech was about human loneliness in an age of screens and AI, and how we need each other and how this class of graduates can bring their comfort with diversity and community to the world and help bring people together.

The gym teacher’s speech was, as my friend Matthew put it, like a transcription of every TJ Maxx pillow ever. “Live, love, laugh,” “Do what you love,” “Hard work pays off,” and that sort of thing, strung together for a good ten minutes free of any actual story or organization, impressing us with the sheer volume of known aphorisms floating ubiquitously and impotently in the current American ether. If only we’d all take TJ Maxx pillows more to heart, this would be a better world.

It’s interesting to be in one’s mid-fifties when one’s child is just coming into the fullness of early blooming, with her beautiful slenderness and voluminous curls that reach her waist. It is sweet, somehow. Circle of life and all that. “What goes around comes around.” It could be a pillow.

If only they’d asked me to address the graduating class …

I think I would have steered as far away from advice and the future as possible, just to be different, and would have offered instead this abecedarian poem I have written for the occasion:

My Letter(s) to A Graduating Class

Is a flock of rising geese flapping in your upper chest
like expectation and happiness
flying in a V?
Is brightness billowing around your body
in the form of a polyester gown?
Do you accept my kiss, our kisses,
and our checks? Spend them.

Please accept, also, our apologies
for any doubts we had, any hint
that you were ever doing anything less
than exactly what you had to do, to a T:
Try, laze, trip, purse your lips and blow
into the flute like spitting rice,
raise your hand into the air
bending at the wrist, a swan's head on its neck,
and slump so your spine formed an S,
roll your Rs and your eyes. 
Well, we had to mother. 

Who says you are "Gen Z?"
Don't take it literally.
Gen Go, Gen U,
Gen Now, Gen New.
Choose your own letter later
after you've done whatever it is
you came to do. 
The pillow is yours to write! 

Tune into my new radio show on Sundays!

Hey! I will be hosting a new radio talk show, “Human Intelligence,” starting the second Sunday in July, on WRFI, 88.1 Ithaca, a community radio station. My show will be conversations between me and guests about that guest’s area of expertise. Guests and topics I have in mind so far include Matthew on the topic of youth sports (he’s a longtime coach), my father-in-law on the topic of electric fish, and I’d love to talk my friend Shannon into sharing her experiences training and testing AI, a dystopian job she’s had for about a year now and which has given her great insight into the nature of AI. Maybe I’ll have her on along with someone who also understands the origins and inner workings of AI models. (If that’s you, email me!)

Anyway, tune in on the radio or online to WRFI on Sunday, July 13 to hear my inaugural show!