S P E A KI N G
F OR T HE
F A CU LT Y : J E SSE B E R R E T T / C O M M E NCE M E NT S P E E CH 2012
In our own life stories, we’re far from omniscient narrators, and sometimes we don’t
even steer the plot. A noted thinker on the subject, Mick Jagger—who put in two
years at the London School of Economics before quitting to front an obscure rock
band—once observed that you can’t always get what you want. My first major
realization of this truth came in my second year of Little League, when it became
clear that despite a batting average I calculated at .462 (counting every time I got a
hit, or some kid on the other team fell down, overthrew the first baseman, or let one
of my semi-sizzling line drives hit him in the face or dribble through his legs . . .) that
despite this obviously awe-inspiring stat line, the Red Sox were probably NOT going
to be offering me their second-base job someday. No problem, I can handle this, lots
of other things to do.
When I was 16 and feverishly pondering literary classics like How to Moonwalk at
the mall bookstore, then rushing home and trying my best to reproduce the
illustrations, it became apparent that Michael Jackson, or even Tito Jackson, was
NOT going to seize the opportunity to take me on tour as a dancer at any time in the
next millennium. No problem, I can handle that. (Though I did recently discover that
two of my colleagues both specialized in moonwalking way-back-when. My secret
plan is to challenge them to a dance-off sometime soon and then immediately
acquire an injured leg.)
This spring, at the ripe old age of 45, I was convinced by torrents of extremely faint
praise that I did NOT harbor undiscovered artistic talents. My efforts at the iPad
game Draw Something earned such critical raves as “Don’t play with him! It’s
horrible!” and, from some guy who teaches Civ or something, “Margaret and I spent
two hours trying to figure out what that was supposed to be.” No problem, I can
handle that. I had a job; lots of other things to do.
Now, you guys may be thinking, right, we all make choices. Nobody can be
everything all the time. Putting away childish things is the mark of adulthood, and so
on. Where’s the profound stuff? I expected one of those speeches where adults
lecture graduates about the grownup issues that they’ll face in the future, and
graduates all nod absently and try not to worry about being grownups yet.
So here’s some profound stuff . . . He said hopefully.
Let me tell you about a time when I DIDN’T have lots of other things to do: the most
challenging challenge I’ve ever faced.
When we took my son to his fifteen-month checkup, the doctor asked, Is he talking?
Not really, we said.
Well, he said, you might want to take him to a speech therapist and get some
sessions going. Just . . . to see.
No big deal, we thought.
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Over the course of that fall and what Californians call winter, we discovered that it
was a big deal. We learned just how many different specialists you can unearth
when your child is not hitting his marks. We visited
speech therapists
and developmental pediatricians
and occupational therapists
and play therapists
and doctors in small, cobwebby studios
and companies with plush, well-lit offices and snazzy, think-positive letterhead.
Four months of evaluations later, we emerged from these offices toting an autismspectrum diagnosis. We picked up lots of brochures threatening us that every
second we wasted not purchasing services, even as we were squandering time
reading this very brochure, was another second for our son to fall behind. So we
stopped picking up brochures. We made a speech therapist cry. By the time he was
three days into kindergarten, our son had been to or considered four different
schools. We were staring point-blank at a very scary future.
Seven years later, we’re still plugging away. My son is an amazing little guy who
makes me laugh every day. He kicks my butt at Mario Kart and Super Mario
Brothers and Super Smash Brothers Brawl and then makes sure to remind me that
I’m bad. He can tell you where ANY bus in the city goes and map the entire BART
and Caltrain systems. He’s the best speller and maybe the best math student in his
class. He can remember exactly where we sat in a restaurant we went to eighteen
months ago, including what day of the week we visited. He adds three-digit
numbers for fun. He reminds me of myself in ways that make me tingle with pride,
and in others that make me cringe more than glow. He drags me into stores to ride
the elevators, which repeatedly requires me to look like the kind of person who
might plausibly peruse the offerings at such fine emporia as
Williams-Sonoma (possibly);
Neiman-Marcus (not so much);
and Forever 21 (not on your life).
And yeah, some things just flummox him. He probably can’t describe the movie he
just saw; he won’t say hello to my parents on the phone. He spent most of March
refusing to go to school because a bad field trip pushed his panic button. Only last
month a doctor at UCSF told us that she knew some kids like him, just 15 years
older. They hadn’t, in general, been able to go to college or hold down jobs, she said.
Stop, we said. Maybe the supports for kids like him will be better in a decade. Maybe
not. All we can do now is keep learning about who he is and what works for him,
figure out what will help him grow into the best adult he can be, and try not
anticipate too far forward. Most of our days as parents are pretty much normal; but
there are harder days, and there always will be.
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Has this experience made me a better human being? I’m hopeful but not certain.
Has it made me more open to the weird joys of daily life and less obsessive about
things I can’t control? I’d like to think so.
More important, has it made me a better teacher, more sympathetic to my students’
right to their uniqueness and more sensitive to how differently others approach the
world, both in- and outside my classroom? I think it has. Someone here wrote me a
thank-you note a couple of weeks ago that said in my class “I felt I was welcome to
be me and all the weird parts of myself were appreciated.” That sentence really
meant a lot to me.
I suppose that’s my lesson plan today—none of us knows for certain where we go
next. And no matter how often people inform us of this truism in such venues as, for
instance, graduation speeches, none of us really knows what it means until we
experience it for ourselves.
Some things we can plan for, and some we can’t.
Some things we deserve, if we’re lucky, and some we don’t.
Some things we resolve, and some we just keep dealing with.
One of the wisest spirits I’ve ever encountered, the cranky old Jewish socialist shortstory writer Grace Paley, knew this better than anyone. In a great story called “A
Conversation with My Father,” which recounts . . .a conversation with her father, he
challenges her to tell one simple story before he dies: “just recognizable people and
write down what happened to them next.”
She can’t, she says: “I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that
begins: ‘There was a woman . . . ’ followed by plot, the absolute line between two
points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all
hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” To see
where their argument about storytelling and life goes, read the book. But I will tell
you that Dad gets the last word.
I have to admit that I’ve always coveted Grace Paley’s attitude toward life, which I
hope to attain by accumulating the attributes that produced it:
“cranky” I achieve on my good days;
“old” I’m getting better at by the minute;
“Jewish” I’ve got down fairly well;
“socialist,” sometimes.
So take this as aspirational, as much on my part as on yours: the plot I’d wish for my
story is the plot I wish for all of yours: not some fantasy of total intellectual
understanding or total happiness; not piles of money.
It’s the chutzpah to look life in the face with the kind of emotional health Paley
cultivated—the realism to understand that every person faces obstacles; the
generosity to celebrate your own oddities; the guts to say “stop” when you need to
write your own ending; the curiosity never to pass up a chance to learn something.
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My favorite memory of this school year has nothing to do with a class, ironically: one
day Ginger, Stella, and I stayed two hours after school just talking about stuff: about
how weird life is sometimes, and how weird we are sometimes, and how no matter
how much and how deeply you try to think things through,
no matter how smart you try to be,
no matter how many books on a subject you’ve read, or just purchased and
optimistically added to your giant to-read pile (a particular failing of mine)
you still keep making the same mistakes and falling into the same pits.
We’re people; it’s what we do.
So I wish for you the strength and courage to make mistakes, to meet challenges
with humor and self-knowledge
and acceptance of your own frailties and strange joy;
and some good, honest relationships, not least with yourself, to let you talk it
through. Thank you.
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