Mr. Holtberg, Distinguished Faculty, Gentlemen....
Before I address the weighty and matter I have before me, I want to thank you all for
what has, so far, been an extraordinary year. Moving to a new school is always a trying
experience but everyone in this room have made the experience much more palatable. I
came here a bow tie wearing whacko from sand hill in the sea, and, in spite of that,
everyone has made room at the table for me.
The following story is ascribed to Saint Augustine. A novice approached the old priest as he methodically wrote one cold morning. He was bent over the desk in the cold half light at 6 AM, matted greasy hair, hands shaking with age, and a great old man odor rose from him as he methodically wrote out the words "City of God." The novice approaches and begs to ask the great man a question. "Auggie, what would you do, if you had only one week left to live." The great man dipped his pen into the well and laboriously finished the line of a "d." Without looking up, he said "Precisely what I am doing right now."
Now, I tell you that story because my mother told it to me, long ago, and I found some comfort in it. Not that I believed a word of it. My mother was always driving myself, my brother, or my sister to some practice or another, vacuuming up some mess, grading horrible biology papers, trying to diet, or buying us food. If it were my last week on this earth, the last thing I would want to do would be to get up at 4:30 and drive me to swim team practice. I would go to Cancun, perhaps. Or Disneyworld Especially since she talkied about going there all the time.
Horrible things always seemed to happen to her. She was ....small of stature, so we always laughed when she had to jump to get a pan off the top shelf. Terrified of dogs, she would attract the neighbors rottweiler when she walked out the front door. She was a small, but stout woman with a good sized front porch, a place guaranteed to catch jelly, crumbs, milk, or ketchup and remain there for the rest of the day, much to her childrenıs shame and delight.
Each winter, we went for a ski vacation up in Vermont. My mother always wanted to go to Disneyworld, but that was always for next year. Skiing had once been a relative strength for my mother, then she had kids and found excuses to stay in the base lodge reading magazines all day. My father would work on her, of course, and she would look at the expensive skis, sigh, and come out for a few runs. Now she learned how to ski before there were ski lifts. So this machine that swung a chair around, plucked her up into the sky, and then set her down on a ramp, was an uncomfortable and unusual experience.
She usually got past this by asking the lift operator slow the lift down so that she could get on in as safe a manner as possible, and then be up in the air before the machine got up to full speed. Getting off was different. One cold February afternoon when I was twelve, we pushed her out skiing. With much fuss, she put on her brown snow paints, her brown ski jacket, a faux fur hat and her goggles. Finally, we got her up the lift, with my father riding alongside. When they came to the top of the mountain, my father skied down the ramp and watched my mother remain on the chair as it kept on going. spun around the big wheel and headed down the mountain. Finally, someone stopped the entire chair lift.
There she hung, like a chocolate ball on a string. We all stared. All of our friends stared. Total strangers stared. the trees stared. And my mother hung there for minutes. When she finally got down, she skied over to her mortified family. My father was all apologies, and th e rest of us just wanted to get away as fast as possible. She bit her lip in amusement and said "I bet you have never seen that before." No, we hadn't.
When I think of my mother these days, I think of the various parts of me that are me because of something my mother said or did. Like my mother, I am fond of poaching of other people's plates, I spill food on myself, I eat too much chocolate, I drink too much beer, and, most importantly I laugh at myself. Since I am sermonizing today, that is the one gift I would like to recommend to you.
Because we do so much stuff that is just patently ridiculous every day without thinking about it. Look at you uniforms, for instance. Itıs winter and you guys all wear shorts. You need to ask permission to go to the bathroom. Bow ties, even. What up with these thing. That doesnıt count all the dumb things we do by accident, like swimming into walls....Boris.
No, everybody swims into a wall sooner or later, and everyone forgets to get off the chairlift and sometimes the only things you can do is either laugh or cry. And Laughing is a lot neater, and easier, and, frankly, more true.
And when real troubles come,laughter is a heck of a lot easier to deal with. My mother spent five years living with breast cancer and all the other cancers that come along with it. Chemotherapy has very little humor in it, nor do MRI's, constipations, nor radical mastectomies. So you need the humor even more.
At one point during the cancer, my mother had a breast removed. Now, As I mentioned before, my mother had a front porch, so this was a significant alteration. With all the pain and discomfort, she hadtwo hopes. The first was that the cancer would leave along with it, the second was that she would finally lose some weight. Through some trick of surgery, she left the hospital two pounds heavier and one breast lighter than when she went in.
When I last talked to my mother, two years ago this week, she cracked wise about her digestion. She didnıt know it, but a cancerous polyp was preventing her lower intestine from working correctly. She thought she just couldnıt give a ______
Laughter. We all need a stand-up comedian in the topright hand corner of our minds to look at the things weıre doing and remind us how funny they really are. We need someone to tell us to get over it and get on with it, and to crack wise in the face of doom. Because life is all too short to drink bad wine. We are not here long enough and we canıt choose when we go and we can't get any real justice out of it and there always is a Disneyworld that we never get to go to. Augustine was right and he was right for everybody. We go out doing "just what we are doing right now." So we better be laughing.
