An Unremarkable Day

A Student--"Song #1" (mp3)
A Student--"Song #2" (mp3)

It was an unremarkable day yesterday, a day hardly worth noting, a sad day. The pall of a teenager's death, a girl from a nearby school, hung over an already cloudy and chilly campus.

The first student I saw in my first class at 8:00AM was the boy who had taken her to the prom a mere week earlier. "You don't need to be here," I told him, but he had a missed assignment he needed to complete for me and he was there to complete it. He said he knew he had three difficult days ahead to get through and so he wanted to do it now.

He carried the additional burden of being thought of as her boyfriend, which he wasn't, not her friend, which he was. The prom connection carried all kinds of implications, and like it or not, he was going to go through this day, and perhaps several that follow, expected to be something that he might have liked to have been, might have just started to have been, but wasn't. But he was there.

It became a day of labored excuses. When a student dies, anyone who wants a piece of the tragedy is welcome to it, to use for his or her own purposes. Such is our fear of teenage depression, perhaps with good reason. And so, classes were skipped, assignments put off, expectations excused, obligations not met.

I got caught up in it, too. It became a day of laborious inactivity. By nightfall, I was lying on a couch watching episode after episode of a season of 24 that I had already seen, just pushing the button for the next episode the second that the credits for the previous one had ended.

But a couple of interesting things had happened, small things. We have a final assembly for our graduating seniors today, and we had to move it up a day to accomodate the girl's funeral. As happens in these situations, everyone wants a senior assembly, but no one wants to do it. And so, it falls on, typically, just one student to pull it off. All the other seniors want it to be good, funny, memorable, but they are done, done, done. They got nuthin'.

And so it falls to that one guy, and I keep running into him all day. He's getting video together, calling and texting like a madman, he's negotiating with the Upper School head, he's calling other guys trying to find out when and where their parts of the assembly are and when he can get them, he's reassuring me that he'll get me the stuff by night. At the same time, he's trying to work out some kind of senior prank, find some way to pay for it, hope against hope that it will matter. I tell him to call me, to let me know what he needs. He never does.

And, late in the morning, a senior I barely know walks into my office and hands me a CD. "Here's my senior project," he says. I look at it; it is obviously a bunch of songs. I look at him and say, "You have made my day," but I don't mean it, at least not in the way that I say it to him. I said, "I will look forward to listening to these songs later," and I shake his hand and he is gone.

But the truth is, I didn't remember his senior project, didn't remember giving him the green light to spend his required two afternoons a week working on writing, performing, and recording his own music. And so, when he handed me the CD, I was shocked, didn't even know what it was, and, as I said, didn't really even know him. All of which made it more awe-inspiring that he had fulfilled a fuzzy obligation that we had set who-knows-how-many-months earlier.

How surprising it is sometimes when someone does what he has committed to doing.

We tend to think that we can decide when we're finished with something, and perhaps we can, but it makes all the more remarkable those persons who keep on going, even in the smallest of ways, when everyone else has thrown in the towel.

I think the songs by the student are better than you might expect.

Joe

Come Sail Away (Live, 1996) - Styx (mp3)

Joe turned 20 in December. He will never turn 21. His four-year fight with cancer included momentary victories and at one point or another impacted half of his body. Scars on his chest, on his back, on his knee. Poison also known as chemotherapy surged through every vein and artery in his body. Below are the words I spoke at his funeral service, held at our school on Thursday, January 14, 2010.

At one point in his journey, Joe dreamt of getting into a boat and sailing into the wide blue yonder. Mostly he dreamt of going alone. Once in a while, he might find a port and allow his beloved younger brothers to hop aboard for a few days. Maybe the occasional visit from his parents. And, less frequently, he would even consider allowing one of his great friends to experience the open water with him, but it wouldn't be a regular thing.

He went so far as to spend time searching for the right boat, reading books and arranging for lessons to learn how to sail properly, hoping to make this dream come true. Eventually Joe acknowledged that this dream was beyond his grasp, and instead he "settled" for an amazing trip through Europe. He was so very grateful to his parents for giving him that trip. He even liked France except for all the French people. Although it wasn't sailing on the ocean, it was time away from everything and everyone familiar. Time alone to explore and contemplate and just be.

We are all, as humans, entangled in difficult-to-explain contradictions. Alongside this intense desire for separation and solitude existed Joe's intense love for his family and friends. He saw the kind of loyalty and love his trevails had inspired. But I think being at the center of that, and seeing it from his perspective, put a lot of strain on Joe, pressure to be or do or symbolize something big when his dreams and hopes were so very different before this all started.

O Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.

Joe didn't want this role. He despised it, in fact. I can't even recall how many times he spoke to me, often in the midnight hours in my kitchen, openly angry about his lot in life, an anger he earned but held in check more often than not. In our last conversation before he started UPenn, the single thing that excited him most was getting away from his cancer, making new friends who could like him for him. Not for osteosarcoma, not for the tragedy of his situation. Just because he was clever or cute or a sharp dresser any of those little things that draws one typical freshman to another typical freshman.

Part of what I think Joe hated about his illness was that it felt like he was cheating. I think he worried that his illness gave him an unfair advantage on the loyalty and love and support of friends and strangers, and Joe was most decidedly someone who felt like things had to be earned and deserved. Of course, Joe wasn't cheating at all. Joe drew people to him in ways that none of us, in a similar circumstance, quite could have. Seeing the rows of blue blazers, more than two dozen of his loyal and loving classmates and friends, sitting in that Charlotte church on Tuesday both broke my heart and lifted me in ways I can't express. I think it did the same for almost every grieving person in that sanctuary.

O Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.

I don't mean to give anyone here the impression that Joe was a Christ figure -- Joe would certainly haunt me with expletive-ridden screams if I did -- but anyone trapped into knowing their days are numbered must have a similar experience.

Jesus found himself incredibly impatient with his friends. He felt lonely a lot, because all these people who loved him simply couldn't appreciate what was going on. All they could do was try to sympathize, and even that sympathy stilted the way a more natural relationship should have worked. In this way, Joe's frustrations and challenges with relationships were quite similar. Conversations sometimes felt more stilted, because people just didn't know quite what to say to him. Not all the time, but enough that everyone knew that the cancer thing was in the room with them.

Joe had no choice but to carry the burden of his illness, to bear the weight of altered friendship dynamics, to be Joe Cancer. As much as he hoped UPenn would be a place where he could begin life on his own merits, fair and square, eventually even his friends there discovered the truth he hoped to hide.

The Road wasn't Joe's favorite Cormac McCarthy novel. He preferred All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian. But in The Road, a boy and his father -- another man who must wrestle with his own imminent demise -- walk a desolate and dying world where few if any can be trusted. Theirs is a horrific odyssey.

We're going to be okay, arent we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

The father, struggling with his health, convinces the boy that they are keep the fire -- the best parts of humanity -- alight, and they cannot die, because they cannot allow the fire to die.

Whether Joe wanted this burden, whether he enjoyed it, is actually irrelevant. What all of us sitting in this Chapel know is that Joe carried that fire. He carried it in his quiet, understated, sarcastic, critical, pensive, brilliant way. He carried the fire in a way that somehow managed to inspire all of us to want to or need to carry it with him.

And carry it you have. And will. Dozens of guys and parents returning for last year's Bone Cancer Awareness Walk. Those who returned to this Chapel for Joe's talk just a few months ago. Going in carefully-measured droves to Charlotte and invading his family's household to show your love and support for him. And a family, wrapped around Joe almost like a blanket these last few months, offering every ounce of themselves day and night to him.

We carry Joe's fire. This is his final gift to us, a gift that's both a blessing and a vital responsibility. He gave us a kind of fire we never had before we became witnesses to his journey. It continues to burn brightly in our hearts.

Joe, meanwhile, finally gets his dream. He captains his sailboat into a vast ocean of beauty and wonder and mystery, free of his illness and pain, free from the restraints of time or responsibility. On occasion, he will stop at a port in our hearts and minds, and he will let us visit him for a while. And then he will insist on continuing his journey but will promise to keep in touch, as he always did. As he always will.

Why I Love Young People

Thom Yorke--"After The Goldrush (live)" (mp3)
Cracker--"Teen Angst" (mp3)

Teaching in a well-to-do, mostly white private boys' school, as I have done for the past 25 years, I have long since stopped doing battle with my students over politics. Many of us, when we were younger, found ourselves in do-or-die philosophical wars with our students over all things political. But there was a price to be paid for that; after all, we were not teaching political science. We were teaching English. And if you want your boys to stick with you through a hard text, you're going to have to put some things aside. That was an epiphany that took awhile.

For the longest time, we refused to acknowledge that our students were more conservative than we were and would continue to be so.

It seemed to go against the order of the universe. But the universe changes.

I'm glad.

This time around, I can't claim that my students have seen the light, have come over to my side of things, have cast off their parents' wealth-and-religion based conservatism to embrace the promise that is Obama (although I have noticed more students in the Democratic ranks than ever before). No, some have come back from the summer having volunteered for the McCain campaign, and many of them still hiss when the Young Democrats announce their meetings during clubs period.

That doesn't matter to me. One reason I love the neverending stream of 18-and-under boys who populate this school is because they show me that things have changed far beyond what this country understands yet.

Case in point: it doesn't cross most of my seniors' minds that anyone would let race determine who they would vote for in a presidential election. Maybe that isn't quite right. They will talk about the "old racists" and what the "old racists" will do or say, but they talk as if those people, though still living, represent the values of another time. And they don't hold those older people in judgement either; there's more likely kind of a shoulder shrug or matter-of-fact restatement of those beliefs.

I'm not naive enough to ignore the haters out there or the under-their-breath mutterers, but most of the students I teach have the hubris, perhaps justified, to want to challenge the economic policies of a candidate who wants health care for everyone; they're not interested in discussions of race.

Maybe we've beaten it out of them: too many years of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, Native Son, The Color Purple, and the like. That is a possibility, because they aren't going to embrace a novel for its race any more than they are going to reject a candidate for his. They're like, 'Okay, I get it. Racism was bad. Please stop beating that message to death. We'd rather talk about whether or not individual suffering serves the greater good.'

My students have told me more than once, in more than one way, that the racial issues that I want to bring up don't matter to them. We forget, I think, that they've always lived in a world where if the black quarterback is better than the white one, then, of course, he should be the one who starts. We want to win, don't we? Apply the same thinking to any situation. And, for the same reason, they'd be upset if we went to them and said, 'We haven't ever started a black quarterback, so we need to start one now.' It would make no sense to them at all.

So we look at the upcoming election as being one of groundbreaking, historic proportions, a victory after years of struggle, a mandate for America. What do our students think? Maybe a little of that. They're certainly aware of it. But, more likely, they're thinking that if Obama wins, it will be because he ran the more effective campaign, and if he loses, it will be because he didn't. Sure, he faces obstacles, some of them unfair, some of them unethical, but so does any candidate, and it's his obligation to figure those out and to outmaneuver his opponent. That's the only way to win, isn't it? No one ever said it was going to be fair.


Thom Yorke's live performance of Neil Young's "After The Goldrush" took place at Young's Bridge Concerts. The well-known Cracker tune is available at Itunes.