I didn’t cry at my only child’s
graduation from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana recently. The older I have
gotten, the less sentimental I have grown, which somehow makes me think of
Yeats’ lines on his grave, “Cast a cold eye/On life, on death/ Horseman, pass
by.”
Still, there was one moment in the
Baccalaureate Ceremony in the Wellness Center on Saturday morning—it had been
raining with Biblical ferocity for days and all ceremonies were indoors--when one
of the graduating seniors from a village in Kenya stood up at the lectern and
said one sentence, in his sing-song African accent, that nearly unleashed a flood
of tears inside me: “Everything will be all right.”
Surely he must have said more, as so
many of the commencement speakers did that day—reflections about the urgency of
embracing lost causes, advice about tolerating uncertainty and adversity,
metaphors about how humans are like stars in that none of us alone creates a
constellation…and yet, it was as if those five words cast a spell over
everything else—The Buddhist and Hebrew Prayers, the Quaker Quotations, the Spanish
Poems—and created a stillness that quieted even the gestures of the interpreter
for the hearing impaired.
Everything will be all right. Even though we are
presided over by “the man in orange,” as one African-American student speaker
referred to him, who seems hell-bent on applying a wrecking ball to every piece
of progressive legislation of his precedessor, making it harder for Earlhamites
from Muslim countries to travel back to their homelands. But courts have
already challenged the constitutionality of this travel ban and graduating
seniors have created The International Student Relief Fund to help Earlham students
who might be affected by the travel ban, a fund which has already raised
several thousand dollars, and to which this writer has contributed a modest
sum.
Everything will be all right. Even though the world in
which my son will be taking his place is increasingly bifurcated by the haves and
the have-nots, those with many zeros behind their names and those who struggle
to get by on a few dollars a day.
But all is not lost because my son and
many of his peers are pledging to give back to their communities, determined
not to model their lives after the self-aggrandizing offspring of the 45th
president. In August, my son will start working
for City Year, an Americorps program for Apprentice Teachers in inner-city
Boston. Forgoing many of the pleasures he grew up with, he will live close to
the poverty level, helping students in under-served public schools reach their
potential and graduate from high school.
Everything will be all right. Even though my only
child’s father and I have been divorced for four years, a divorce that was sometimes
bitter, as divorces will be, as were the divorces of both sets of his
grand-parents. Still, here we are sitting for many hours side-by-side in the
metal folding chairs in the Wellness Center of Earlham College, watching our
son being folded in the bosomy embrace of the Registrar, filing out into the
sunshine of a perfect May day and meeting the kindly professor with a full, white
beard who reminds us of Dumbledore in Harry Potter and who says that having our
son in his Islam and film class every morning was a joy.
Everything will be all right because we are held still
in this achingly imperfect world trying not to cast too cold an eye on those
who have come before us and those who come after us and struggling, in our
imperfect ways, to put ourselves to right.
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