20.

GRADUATING

I was ready to leave Oldfields. I had discovered my role as a leader, and had improved my grades enough to welcome the challenge of college. The primitive almonds in the medial temporal lobes of my brain still got triggered by test anxiety, but I had learned to compensate. When Miss McPherson, the college adviser, tried to tell me I was only two-year-college material, I defied her condescension and applied only to Middlebury, an esteemed four-year institution. I got in, early decision.

The fall of my freshman year, I fell in love with geography. This was a surprise, as I have no sense of direction. But maybe that was why. Today I know it was more than that. Geography was about seeing the whole, a subject that demands perspective with the knowledge of a generalist.

At Middlebury, I became a weaver of natural science and writing. I worked hard, made many friends, built rafts to race in the spring swells of river flow, and initiated the first crafts fair for students and faculty. My senior thesis brought me back to my old stomping grounds near North Country School. I analyzed the methodology of the Adirondack Park’s land use plan.

When the time came to graduate, the ceremony held special meaning to me. It marked the culmination of many tears and sweat, and the painful, uphill battle to believe in my abilities, despite average grades. Social and emotional skills got me the help I needed, but confidence was still hard won. At times I was unsure if I would do well enough to graduate. I did.

A month before the Middlebury commencement, I learned my father was going to be given an honorary degree at the ceremony. I was proud of his many successes, but I felt overshadowed by his fame and didn’t want him to upstage my own accomplishments on graduation day. The work I had done to succeed academically and to compete in family debates suddenly felt invisible. I had a narcissistic need but a justifiable one, given how hard I had worked, to have my own day in the light. My father had often been away on my birthday and had never been able to come to my class plays or piano recitals. The only event I remember him attending was my eighth grade graduation. How dare he get an honorary degree when he hadn’t even worked for it? I called my mother.

Had I thought more clearly before reaching for the phone, I might have remembered her own distress at not being allowed to attend college when her parents were too proud to let her accept a full scholarship to Bennington College after losing much of their money in the Great Crash of 1929. My plea unleashed years of suppressed regret and humiliation. Her words sizzled over the phone. “How dare you talk like that? You have no right to object. This is selfish and spoiled behavior and I don’t ever want to hear you talk this way again.” A cold tingling emanated from the pit of my stomach upwards. I put down the phone and shook. Her words stuck like cuts from a hundred lashings.

Perhaps I gave my mother an opportunity to express the rage and sorrow she had bottled up so many years ago when her own parents probably talked to her in the same manner. From her vantage point she would gladly have shared the stage with her father had he only let her go to college. Unresolved pain repeats itself.

A strange event happened shortly thereafter, which marked the beginning of my belief in God. On May 20, 1974, ten days after the excruciating phone call with my mother, my father slipped on a recently washed terrazzo floor of a hotel lobby in Taiwan. His hip snapped. He was fifty-nine years old and it was the first bone he had ever broken. Tests later showed he was beginning to get osteoporosis. The result was that he could not attend my graduation. I would have my hard-earned moment in the spotlight after all.

I was asked to give an acceptance speech for my dad’s honorary degree on his behalf. I spoke about his collection of beetles as a way of humanizing the man who could get his telephone call returned personally from practically any leader in the world.

What were the chances of his breaking his hip just before the culmination of my years of painful, though ultimately successful, academic training? I said a prayer of thanks and asked God to heal my father’s hip fast. Just in case there was a glimmer of truth in my mother’s diatribe, I also asked Him to forgive me for my selfishness. I felt God answer my call for forgiveness as I remembered the words engraved on the wide silver bowl I had received upon graduating from Oldfields: COURAGE, HUMILITY, AND LARGENESS OF HEART. It was their highest honor for character. Whenever I feel myself doubting my own worth, I remember the bowl and how its wide rim opens like the shape of acceptance.