(no subject)
Valedictory Address
Well, we’ve come a long way.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Superintendent Dr. Judith Caviston, Father Vic Butler and visiting clergy, Mr. Joseph Lemme and the leadership team, the wonderful faculty here at Holy Cross, as well as our parents, friends, and assorted family members for coming out tonight to witness the graduation of the Holy Cross Class of 2004.
In all my years here, I’ve never been able to ride the bus to or from school. I live about two blocks from the legal cutoff line in my town, so making the journey home before I could drive was never easy. When my mom was home she could come pick me up, but on the two days a week that she went into the office, I often found myself in a vexing position. I would gather my books, watch my fellow Delanco residents board their yellow chariot without me, and then proceed to walk the 2.4 miles back to my house. Alone. The cold wind blew my long, limp hair into my face as I made my way through three towns, and by the time I reached home at last, my feet were sore from nearly an hour of walking on concrete in unforgiving loafers. Sometimes I would read a paperback novel as I went, but this ended up being more trouble than it was worth, as I tended to trip over cracks in the sidewalk and hit my head on branches above in my concentrated state. More often, I spent the time just looking and listening, immersing myself in the familiar suburban atmosphere around me.
On Fairview Street, I passed dozens of patchy lawns riddled with crabgrass, leading up to fairly neat suburban homes with big front porches adorned by decorative flags. There were public school kids all over, walking home from another glorious day at Riverside High, sporting cargo pants and WWF t-shirts-all completely foreign to me. A little further down, I would pass Clarence’s Volkswagen Repair, where dozens of barely recognizable VW Beetles of every color lay arranged in rows, stripped of their headlights, windshields, spark plugs, crankshafts-anything of value. As a result of all the years of passing Clarence’s, I’ve come to develop a refined taste in the aesthetic virtues of destroyed automobiles.
And then I crossed the old green bridge, pausing each time to look out over the picturesque creek to my left, attempting to read the relative water depth from the ripples on the surface the way a young Sam Clemens did on the Mississippi River a century and a half ago.
Throughout my journey, I always held a certain hope that some kind driver would stop to pick me up and give me a ride the rest of the way home-a student or a teacher or some friend of the family who just luckily happened to be passing by. I walked on the right side of the road in order to attract this kind of attention, and sometimes it actually worked. On many occasions it was Dave Rietzen in his red Blazer who stopped his vehicle in the middle of the street, yelling “Get in the car!” with a kind of reckless urgency that was infinitely appealing to me. Once it was a young math teacher, who blasted a rap and R & B station all the way to Delanco, singing along the whole way. And in one retrospectively poignant incident on the way home, I shared my final conversation with the father of a student I had gone to grade school with-a man who would die of brain cancer less than a year later.
Yet in the end, there I was. Whether I rode partway in a car or I made the whole trip on foot, I always ended up on my front step, where I unlocked the door and dropped my forty-pound backpack on the carpet inside-home.
Right now we’re in a very unique stage in our lives. We’ve got some good years behind us, but more importantly, we’ve got the potential for even better years ahead. And notice that I say “potential.” At this point, most of us are naïve enough to believe that there are absolutes in life: If you work hard, you get good grades, which means you get a good job, which means you marry a good spouse and live in a good home on the fashionable side of town-and more importantly, you make a name for yourself in the world. In reality, however, the fact is . . . God plays dice.
There’s always an element of chance in life, always the potential that things will turn out much different than you expect-for better or for worse. All you’ve learned over the past four years in high school, all you’re going to learn over the coming years in college-the best it can do is tip the scales in your favor; there are no guarantees. Often, people end up with what they have only because they’re in the right place at the right time. I might not even be making this speech as valedictorian if I had gone to Lenape-maybe not even if I had been in another class here at Holy Cross. There is always an element of dumb luck involved in every accomplishment-and every failure. You should become comfortable with this idea now, before you’ve had much chance to experience it firsthand.
As a result of this essential randomness, we end up with a kind of bell curve of success. Undoubtedly, a few people will end up at the skinny top end of the curve, where they’ll spend their days lying in a hammock, surrounded by beautiful women who will fan them with tropical leaves and feed them fresh fruit by hand. For the rest of us, I hope life will be a little more interesting.
I’m sure one or two will end up living in a luxury suite on the Upper East Side, overlooking midtown Manhattan-or on the other end of the spectrum, perhaps a one-bedroom flat in the heart of Queens. But in the end, I’m willing to bet that around 90% of our class will end up living in neat little suburban homes with big front porches adorned by decorative flags, tangled deep in a web of organically curving lanes. By the time we’re in our forties, we’ll all pay fifteen dollars a gallon to fill up our champagne-colored Ford Explorers, listen to Nelly and Justin Timberlake on the oldies stations, and watch our country go to war against Canada under President Jenna W. Bush. And at the end of the work day, we’ll come home to a freezer full of Hot Pockets and a pack of kids who are just as bratty as you and I are now.
Home.
Admittedly, class mobility is very limited in this country; most of us are going to end up about where we came from on the social ladder. But the fact that there is a chance of improvement is what makes this period in our lives so exhilarating-so utterly delicious. The die has not yet been cast-the future has yet to be determined. And I, like all of you, would like to think I have some power over my fate.
Life isn’t going to be easy, but even if you don’t get lucky enough to be picked up on the side of the road and driven, that doesn’t mean you can’t get where you want to be. I do encourage you to acknowledge the randomness of your trip-to take in your surroundings realistically wherever you are, just for the sake of maintaining your sanity. But at the same time, I encourage you with my whole being to try your best defy this randomness by never becoming complacent. You’ve got all the advantages, folks; you’ve got a Catholic education, a loving family, a country where you can elect your leaders and protest when they don’t do their jobs-don’t squander the odds you’ve been given.
We’re taking tiny steps into adulthood as we speak, ladies and gentlemen . . . so put on your walking shoes and give it your best shot.
By Stephen Reid McLaughlin