Your official commencement speaker tackles the big themes, tells you to abjure greed, to play fair, to serve your community, to know thyself. Your more personally devoted commencement speaker agrees with all that. But he has special wishes for you too — idiosyncratic, of course, what an educated daughter may have come to expect from an oddball. People always said that you resemble him. What he wishes you first is a love of travel. Travel will hold you back from doting on your troubles, and once you’ve seen something of the world, you will recognize foreign places as instances of human range. The logic of Athens, the fortitude of London, the grace of Paris — a city for every facet of the mind. He would have you connect travel with an appreciation of the past as well. In Jerusalem recently, he walked the Old City, brushing thousands of years of faith and murder. He would like you to see yourself as history, to wonder what you would have shouted, or at whom, as Jesus struggled up the Via Dolorosa. He hopes that you will husband your own past too. The past means possibility. He also wishes you a love of animals, which you feel strongly already; he hopes that tenderness lasts and grows. Animals, too, draw people out of excessive self-interest, their existence a statement of need. A dog’s eyes search your face for a mystery as deep as God, asking nothing and everything, the way that music operates. He hopes that you always love music, even the noisy boredom you clamp to your ears these days, while he harbors the prayer that in later years will follow Vivaldi and Bix Beiderbecke. If you learn to love jazz, you will have a perpetual source of joy at the ready. Jazz is serious joy, much like yourself. For some reason, he has always favored culs-de-sac, so he hopes you live on one, someday, a neat little cutoff that surprises the city’s motions with a pause. Trees on the street; he would like that for you, and low modest houses so the sky is evident. He hopes that your mornings are absolutely still except for birds, but that the evenings bulge with human outcry, families calling to one another in the darkening hours. He wishes you small particulars: a letter received indicating sudden affection, an exchange of wit with a total stranger, a moment of helpless hilarity, a flash of clarity, the anticipation of reading a detective thriller on a late afternoon in an electric storm. He hopes that you learn to love work for its own sake. You have to be lucky for that , and find a job that grows out of dreams. Something to do with helping others in your case, he should think, since he has seen your natural sympathy at work ever since your smallest childhood and has watched you reach toward your friends with straightforward kindness. Friends, he knows, you will have in abundance. He wishes them you. He hopes that you will always play sports, just as ruthlessly as you play sports now. He hopes that you will always seek the company of books, including the trashy romances; that you will always be curious about the news, as long as you do not mistake the news for life. Believe it or not, he even hopes that you will always be crazy about clothes, particularly once you establish your own source of income — fashion plate, charge plate. You seem to know the difference between vanity and style. On you high style looks good, kid.
