June 2008
WE'RE WEANED A THOUSAND TIMES BEFORE WE DIE
BY GARY E. SMITH, SENIOR MINISTER, FIRST PARISH IN CONCORD, MASSACUSETTS
This month brings the anniversary of the day I sat with hundreds of parents, friends, and faculty, watching my son and four hundred and fifty other students graduate from Colby College. We sat in the warm sunshine on the sloping front lawn of the library, there on Mayflower Hill, a familiar place I had known from my childhood, sledding there in winter, working in the library itself in summer employment after high school, eating my lunch those summers up there behind the tower windows where now the Class of 1996 banner fluttered in the wind. I grew up in Waterville, Maine and I had known the town well. When I was little, my parents would drive me up around Mayflower Hill so that I could see those license plates from other states; exotic places, for sure. I knew the town. That Sunday morning I sat among the gowns, there with my family: mother and wife to my left, son and daughter to my right.
Charles Osgood delivered the commencement address, the Charles Osgood of CBS radio commentary, the Charles Osgood of CBS Sunday Morning, this poet who was not only the designated commencement speaker but also the father of a graduate. “I will tell you what your parents are all thinking,” he said to the graduates, and I had done very well with my emotions to that point. “They are remembering when you were born, your first steps, your first day of school,” and on he went, and my mind went to the places he said. “And this is a day of beginnings also,” he was saying as I returned. All of this: the sunshine, the smiles, the caps flying in the air against the blue sky, all of this led me to think of commencement, not so much the Colby Commencement, but commencement itself, what was commencing in me.
I had once thought a commencement was a unique moment in time. Once I did it, once I commenced, that would be it. When I thought that, I was remembering my own high school graduation, my own college commencement, and I thought of those moments rather like a sluice gate opening, with the tune of “Pomp and Circumstance” washing out over the graduates. I had once thought you graduated and that was it. New doors are opened. The world is your oyster. Good luck.
“We’re weaned a thousand times before we die,” writes Robert Levy. He continues: “Parents would teach us how to be adults if they themselves knew how, but the fact is, all parents are merely rank amateurs who never turn pro.” My own children will testify how often I have said this to them over the years. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” I would say as I fouled up again. “I’ve never done this before.”
“We’re weaned a thousand times before we die,” Levy says, and this is how the blending of parents and children happened for me on that Mayflower Hill lawn, there in front of the library. Four generations of my family, all of us in stages of commencement, and who could know how many other stories were spread out there: Charles Osgood and his daughter, Gary Smith and his son, and so on.
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Last updated May 22, 2008
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