Our Labor of Love

 

We have grown together, you and I.  Our lives have become intertwined.  I remember walking in to my first day in the old building and there you were, twenty-seven ninth graders also on your first day, apprehensive and confused too, all looking at me wondering, why is this guy making us color our names on a name tag?  That first semester I would teach three out of the five sections of freshmen English and I have felt connected to you ever since.  I have marked time by your class, understood my place in relation to you. 

 

Some of the best moments of not just my career, but my life, have been with and because of you.  Winter Carnival 2006 during the Izzy Dizzy race of all things.  I walked up to the line and you spilled down out of the stands, chanting “Speek,” and spontaneously creating gang signs for me (which I do not endorse.)  And all so that you could see me get dizzy and wobble and lerch for 100 yds.  It is not often that a teacher gets to feel like a rock star, but for a moment I felt like I was someone really special.  Sophomore Dinner dance 2005 - the best dance I have ever been to.  Sitting in front of you while you sat in neat rows, number two pencils in hand writing and writing for hours.  I sat in front of you and knew, “Yes, this is what I want to do with my life.”  I felt so alive.  I felt like everything was in its place.  This is a feeling, because of my type A, obsessive personality, that I don’t experience very often.  I don’t know if I can ever replicate it.  I hope so.  But if I can’t, I am happy it was with you.  Thank you for being special.

 

            And so here we are together again on this last day of your high school careers, both embarking on a new chapter of our lives, moving out of the safety that this time together has lent us.  So I hope that you will indulge me as I take these last moments to give you my one last lesson, one that I have been trying to teach you all along, the only one that really matters.

 

            Find someone to love.  I don’t care if it is a spouse, a child, a parent, a friend.  Find someone and commit to love them for the rest of their life.

 

            Find a love that can find its ultimate expression not in a kiss or an embrace, but in holding hands.  I have been holding my wife’s hand since our train ride home from Times Square, January 1^st 1998.  I reached over as she slept on my shoulder and I stroked the back of her hand.  She was kind enough to pretend that she was still sleeping.  It was nice.  I tell you that in the nearly 10, years since nothing has retained its immediacy, its excitement, its deep joy as much as this simple act of intertwining our fingers.  When I hold her hand, all my broken pieces lose their sharp edges, and I feel connected and whole.  This is love. 

 

            Find someone to become part of your heart, someone to protect.  Find a little soul whose health and wellbeing will supplant all other concerns.  Someone to cradle late into the night when they are sick,  someone whose warm breath washes over you as they sleep in your arms.  Someone who will pass every sniffle and every cold along to you because when they are sick all you want to do is hold them closer, and when they lift their head to ask you, “Daddy, sing to me” and your heart will break with every note.  This is love.

 

            This may seem like an easy thing, but it is not.  I am convinced that no one has ever fallen into love.  Love is not something that happens to you, it is something you grab onto with both fists and pray that you can hold on.  Love is something you recommit yourself to every morning, every day, every moment of your life.  It is something you search for and learn from one encounter at a time.

 

I have learned it from a young man who could never seem to sit down, who could drive me crazy, but who understood the human heart and captured every part of mine.  I remember one day when I was passing out the quizzes that I had spent hours individualizing so that each student would only be responsible for the questions they missed on a previous quiz.  Kyle took his quiz and lifted it up and asked, “So you mean you made a separate quiz for everyone in the room?”

“Yes,” I answered.

He looked at me; he looked at the test and said, “That must have taken a really long time.”

“Yes,” I said.

I really miss him.

 

I have learned that love from my mother who as a five year old girl had suffered every kind of abuse and who swore to herself, “This will end with me.”  Her love shelters me even today as she holds back the weight of generations while I thrive in the tranquil waters at her feet.  It is because of her protection that I stand before you today.  And I am inadequate to repay her except in the application of that love that she taught me.

 

You see, by nurturing a single love, by finding one person to whom you can dedicate your life, you will cultivate a love for humanity.  Love leads us to ever expanding circles of concern until it encircles everything.  The love that I have learned from my wife and our children, from Kyle and my mother has led me to teaching.  It has led me to this day.  It has led me to you.

 

This is what we were put on earth to do, to love.  Great civilizations dissolve into broken architecture of past greatness.  Scientific advances are buried under the crush of the ever expanding flood of words and numbers and facts and minutia.  Great works of literature sadly are forgotten by all but the most cloistered academics. 

 

But this great tide of love that we create through our individual, everyday acts is eternal.  This love, this love for which we all have the capacity, has the ability to change hearts, heal wounds and alter the course of generations.  Love rolls forward towards eternity and expands to fill the infinity of the moment. I have been taught to love and so I love and those I love will love others and with each step, each passing, we learn to do it a little better, listen closer, talk softer, love brighter.

 

            I  hope for so many great things in your future.  I hope that you will find acclaim in whatever you choose as an occupation or endeavor.  I want everyone to know how smart and hardworking and capable you are, but after all that is said and done, my most fervent wish for you is that those who know you best will always say that what you do best is love.  Then I will know that I have done my job.

 

            My dear, dear friends, it is so hard to say goodbye.

 

            Be good.

 

            I will miss you.

 

            I have always loved you.