Last night I delivered the graduation speech at my alma mater, Seven Hills School in Cincinnati. Here's the speech.
Good
evening class of 2009, students, faculty, staff, parents, grandparents,
siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. It’s a thrill for me to be here tonight.
If
anyone had told me twenty-three years ago that I would one day be standing here
delivering the graduation speech at Seven Hills, I would have totally believed
them.
This
is not because I was especially arrogant—I think I was only mildly
arrogant, though I suppose my classmates and teachers might dispute
that—but because the education I got here led me to believe that anything
was possible for me. It was years before I fully understood how incredibly rare
this is.
When
I attended Seven Hills, we were led to believe that we mattered, that we could
do anything we wanted, and that what we did would probably be great. This,
unfortunately, is the exact opposite of the message that most people receive
from their high school education. I know this from working in a variety of high
schools; many high schools are education factories in which the students are
treated like numbers at best or criminals at worst.
So. Those of us who graduate from Seven
Hills start with a tremendous advantage over most of the world. I’m not talking about money
here—I had none when I graduated, and I don’t have much now—I’m
talking about the point of view that life offers endless possibilities, the
idea that the entire world is full of doors that are open for you. I know that this probably just seems
normal to you, but believe me, it isn’t.
Most people look at the world and see a whole bunch of closed
doors. I would argue that starting
out with such tremendous advantages implies for us an obligation to help
everybody else see the doors as open to them and perhaps to help them walk
through.
But
this is a celebration, so I’m not going to wag my finger at you about how you
should devote your lives, or at least a substantial chunk of your future
income, to serving people less fortunate than you. Well, not much anyway.
Wag, wag, wag, please try to spread some of that sense of possibility,
that sense that every person matters, to people who have had their importance
negated at every turn. Please
remember when you see people who are struggling that it’s very hard to succeed
when everyone and everything in your life has told you that you don’t matter,
and please try to help out. Thank you.
I know you’ve all got parties to
get to, so I’ll try to be brief with the rest of this. I can, as most graduation speakers do,
give you advice and platitudes all night, but what I do best is tell stories,
so, because I’m the guy at the podium, I’m going to tell you mine.
Let’s return to 1986, shall
we? Facing down graduation from
Seven Hills, I was panicked about which college to choose. Because if you don’t choose the college
that is exactly right for you, and get chosen by them in turn, your life is
over!
So I visited a bunch of colleges
and applied to a bunch of colleges, and I picked the one that felt good with a
name that would allow my mom to brag.
Also, it was a really nice day when I visited.
Once I got to college, I had to
pick a major. Because if you don’t
pick the right major, you’ll never get the one career that will make you happy,
and then your life will be over!
I ended up picking English for the
following reason: I met a guy who
was in the U.S. on an exchange program from Scotland, and he told me about it,
and I decided I wanted to go there. Since British college students only take
classes in one discipline, I could take all English classes, finish my major in
a year, and then spend my senior year of college studying whatever I
wanted! Also, I liked it and,
compared to other disciplines, it was easy for me. Since I would continue paying for college for ten years
after I graduated, I figured why waste my time studying stuff I hated?
“What are you going to do with an
English major?” people asked me.
“Frame it and hang it on the wall,”
I answered, pretending to look down on them for their mindless careerism while
secretly fearing that I was squandering my meager chance at happiness by
choosing a major that would lead nowhere.
All I knew for sure was that I
didn’t want to teach. Because the
second annoying question people asked me about my major was whether I wanted to
teach, I pretty much ruled it out from sheer contrariness.
Facing graduation from Penn, I had
no idea what I was going to do, and I was terrified. My classmates were getting accepted to law school, getting
jobs with a future, and getting on with their lives, while I had no idea what I
wanted to do, much less how to get there.
What if I made the wrong choice?
I would squander my meager chance at happiness!
Well, some people in the
international programs office where I worked were setting up a program to send
graduates to Taiwan to teach English. This was in April, and they needed
someone to leave for Taiwan at the beginning of June. Well, fortunately, I had nothing else planned, so I, along
with the woman who would later become my wife, went to Taiwan to teach English.
I was excited beyond belief about
the possibility of living in Asia for six months; I was less excited about the
teaching part. But, I figured
having to do some job I hated was a pretty small price to pay for an
opportunity like this. I was familiar with doing work I didn’t enjoy in order
to do stuff I did enjoy: I’d worked summers at an insurance company in order to
have some ready cash to go to Reds games and on dates (sadly, many more Reds
games than dates) for the last four summers.
Except for this: it turned out I loved teaching. So, finally, at age 21, halfway around
the world, I had a vague idea what I was going to do with my life. I would teach, and the brilliant thing
about this was that I could spend the summers writing, and soon I’d be a famous
writer guy!
Well, the problem was, I couldn’t
even be a teacher right away. I
returned home in 1991 to the first Bush recession. I had missed most of the deadlines to apply for graduate
school, and since I hadn’t majored in education, I had no teaching
credential. Fortunately, I had a
degree from an Ivy League university which allowed me to get a job that really
used my skills and talents:
sorting the mail at a computer company. Well, that job did involve extensive use of the alphabet,
which, after all, is the cornerstone of an English major.
But that was okay, because having a
not-very demanding day job allowed me lots of time and energy to pursue my
writing. I wrote a series of
thematically complex short stories in which I explored the following
ideas: sex is fun and work is not.
Shockingly, none of the publications I submitted to could perceive my genius,
and I accumulated stacks of rejections.
I know the typical writer narrative
goes that I was sure of my talent and my dream and I was undeterred by
rejections, but the truth is, I was deterred by rejections. It seemed I wasn’t as good at this as
I’d thought, so I gave up.
Finally I got into grad school. I
had, at that point, lived my whole life in cities, and I was just starting to
understand all the advantages I’d gotten from my Seven Hills education that so
many of my classmates from Clifton Elementary School were denied at their
middle and high schools. I wanted
to spread some of that sense of possibility, so I decided I wanted to work in
an urban school. I was one of the
only volunteers to do student teaching in the Boston Public Schools, so I was
all set to be an urban education warrior.
Except I didn’t get hired in any
urban schools. I ended up getting
a job fifty miles from my home. A
job that did not pay me enough for me to afford to pay my student loans and
have a car. So I took the subway
40 minutes, then hopped in another teacher’s car and rode for 45 minutes to
school. And was teaching by 7:40
every morning.
As soon as summer came, I found my
plan to write thwarted by complete mental and creative exhaustion. And, anyway, I’d already gotten
an official stamp of disapproval from many publications, so there wasn’t much
point in writing because I clearly wasn’t any good at it.
Well, after five years of teaching,
I finally found my way into an urban school. I was married to my best friend, we had a beautiful baby
girl, and I was working where I wanted to work. After three years of living upstairs from a folk singer with
serious anger management issues, we had moved out and found a much better place
to live. Writing had been a youthful dream that died, but, finally, after all
these years, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with both my professional and personal
life, and I was doing it. Life was
perfect.
And then my wife was diagnosed with
breast cancer.
I remember very clearly the weekend
when we were waiting for the test results, feeling very keenly the fact that
our entire life together was balanced on a knife edge. If it’s not cancer, I thought, we’ll
continue along just as we have been, and we’ll occasionally reminisce about the
cancer scare and what a horrible weekend that was. And if it is cancer, that will be the day that our lives
change forever, and the weekend of worrying won’t be just a bump in the road
but the beginning of whatever comes next.
So, it was the beginning of what
came next, and what came next was three years of uncertainty. Or, rather, certainty that neither
Kirsten nor I could face until the very end. I’m not going to take you through
all the ups and downs of those three years, because it’s depressing, if also
funny and heartwarming, and there’s a lot to tell that simply wouldn’t fit
here. Really, I could write a book
about it.
Oh, wait—I did. Kirsten suggested that I write about my
experience during her treatment, primarily I think because she had neither the
energy nor the inclination to listen to me fret about about her. So I wrote some chapters and sent them
off to some friends. One of my
friends, fellow 7 Hills alum Daniel Sokatch, who won just about every award one
can win at our graduation despite never having completed all of his senior
challenges, not that I’m bitter, knew a literary agent and asked if he could
send my chapters to the agent. I said fine, and two weeks later I had a
contract with Random House. After
all of my unsuccessful struggles to get published in my 20’s, I got handed a
book deal with almost no effort on my part ten years later. If it hadn’t come out of the worst
experience of my life, I would have felt guilty about how easy it was.
Once I knew that someone would
actually read what I wrote, not to mention pay me for it, I was off to the
races, which is why I’ve written ten books in the last nine years.
Kirsten died in 2003, just over
three years after her diagnosis. I
was fortunate to be able to take some time to write full time, which really
meant grieving one third of the time, writing one third of the time, and
parenting the other third of the time.
I was 35 and widowed, but I had a plan: I would grieve for a respectable
period, at least a year, then play the field with bespectacled cuties for a
decade or so and ultimately settle for someone I could comfortably and boringly
grow old with when I hit my mid 40’s.
Seven months later, I fell in love
with Suzanne, a single mom who is beautiful and full of life and the furthest
thing from boring I can imagine. And who wears contacts. We were married just
over a year later, and now we are raising our children—my one and her two
became our three—together.
This was an amazing second chance
at life that I am still grateful for every day, and when I thought about how
much had changed in just a few short years, my head would spin. I went from being a high-school teacher
who had given up on writing and was married to Kirsten with one kid to being a
full-time writer married to Suzanne with three kids.
I was happier than I ever really
imagined I could be again, and I felt and still feel incredibly lucky. And the whole thing still feels kind of
surreal to me.
So I was planning to be a full time
writer for the rest of my life, because it is an incredibly sweet gig, never
let anyone tell you different. I
worked three hours a day, took the dog on long walks, worked out, napped every
afternoon, vacationed whenever I wanted, and answered to no one, except for my
wife Suzanne who always wondered why I couldn’t squeeze more--or, let’s be
honest, any--housework into my packed schedule.
I missed forming relationships with
my students, but I didn’t miss grading stacks of papers, having to be civil to
a room full of sullen teens at 7:30 in the morning, and beating the love of
reading out of students by dragging them through works of literature they
hated.
So I had it all planned out. Except two things happened. One was that I started to get
bored. I missed having contact
with other humans, and I really missed the daily sense I had when I was
teaching that my work mattered.
The other was that my books weren’t selling enough copies to keep me
solvent, and I was going broke.
So
I began a half-hearted job search and almost immediately landed a job at the
best place I’ve ever worked, a program where I get to work with motivated
students, do work that matters, work alongside smart, funny, caring people, and
basically get a lot more wins than I have in any other urban setting.
I’m
still alive, so that’s not where the story ends, but that’s where I’m going to
stop it for tonight. I have four
conclusions. You, of course, have
been well-trained by your English and History teachers, so you may draw your
own. They will expect your thousand-word papers on my desk on Monday morning.
1.)I
almost never had a plan when everybody else was running around telling me I had
to have a plan. And things worked
out okay anyway. I wish I hadn’t
let their panic and insecurity affect me. In the immortal words of the Ramones,
“next time, I’ll listen to my heart.”
2.)When
I did have a plan, when I thought I had it all figured out, everything changed
immediately, and I suddenly didn’t have it figured out anymore.
3.)Life
hands you happy surprises as well as horrible ones. You can’t prepare for either kind. All you can do is try to
adapt.
4.)Life
is unpredictable, paradoxical, ironic, and occasionally cruel. So be nice to people. In the end, that’s really the only
thing that matters.
Thank
you. Be safe tonight, be nice to
people, and enjoy the amazing universe of possibility that awaits you.
Recent Comments