Mortar Boards and Floppy Hats, and No White Flags

I'm going to tell you a story. 

Her soft voice blanketed the stadium, soothing as warm honey. It occurred to me that it was sort of odd, a writer delivering a speech. Or, as she promised, telling a story. Prose is prose, but when a writer -- this writer, at least -- tells a story out loud, it's as if she's singing a lullaby, just for you. For you, and all the others in the crowd. One person's story, true and without inflection, grounded in fact but open to anybody's takeaway.

She is an Associate Professor at Tulane, at most fifteen years older that the average graduate, and she is a rising star, a two-time National Book Award winner. She writes about growing up poor and black in Mississippi; her story is about choices -- not one seismic decision to pack up and get out -- but a lifetime of choices that have led her down a sometimes rocky path from, well, one bayou to another. Via Stanford and Michigan. She has done well, particularly if we measure doing well in academic terms. Her story -- as extraordinary as her accomplishments seem -- is riveting in its ordinariness.

Rumors flew, before the graduation ceremony, that this writer -- Jesmyn Ward is her name -- was chosen to deliver the keynote speech by default. It was the same day as the royal wedding, and all the great orators of the world were off to London, where another young American woman of color was writing a new chapter in a very different kind of fairy tale. Different beginnings, different choices, different paths, two good stories being played out before wildly different crowds wearing all sorts of wild headgear. Whether the choice of speaker for my daughter's graduation was by default or by design, it was fortuitous. As was the crowning, on the same day, of a new and distinctly American princess across the pond.

There is nothing like the spectacle of a royal wedding, especially when it mixes stiff upper lips with fire and brimstone sermons and the sounds of a gospel choir belting out "Stand by Me." My daughter's graduation came close, though, with the lyrical, soft-spoken words of a rags to riches story teller washing over our generally more privileged but similarly situated children -- at a crossroads, facing a lifetime of small choices and rocky paths. Just like the rest of us, come to think of it. Jeweled crowns and coveted book awards are hard to come by, but success comes in many sizes and many colors. With small choices, and persistence, as our eloquent speaker reminded us.

Also, at the graduation, an honorary degree was bestowed upon Steve Gleason, the New Orleans Saints hero who lives, now, with ALS. He is wheelchair bound and can no longer speak, but, with the help of technology, his words washed over us, a reminder that even when choices are taken away, we have choices. No white flags is his mantra. It seemed to be the theme of the day, on both sides of the pond.