Head of School’s Commencement Address Share Your Story

By Benjamin D. Williams IV, Head of School

When I was a graduating senior from high school, I delivered what they called the Salutatory Address at Commencement. You’re probably familiar with the Valedictory Address given by the top student in the class. Well, that wasn’t me, so they came up with a different name for it. I have a vague recollection of what I said, but I don’t have a copy of the speech anywhere. No computers back then or Google docs to make archiving easy. My remarks were handwritten, I remember that. I was a terrible typist, which was the only other alternative.

It’s strange, though, that the text of the speech is missing because I have everything else from those days. Had, I should say. In the great purge that has been this last year, I got rid of all of my old schoolwork. I was sort of amazed that I still had the stuff. Looking for a Great Gatsby paper? I had several Ben Williams originals from high school and college. They weren’t that good, though. You’ll be better off on your own.

I say that not because I reread my old papers. I didn’t. But I read some of the teacher comments and looked at the grades. It wasn’t a particularly affirming experience. You graduates will note as you get older that you remember your youth and particularly your scholarship with a certain self-serving generosity that often distorts the truth of things. My guess is that your parents know exactly what I am talking about. We want to remember ourselves at any step along the way as a little or a lot better than we actually were.

Just ask Mr. Nolde, who taught me U.S. History my junior year. On what I remembered to be a relatively brilliant term paper on William Jennings Bryan and the Campaign of 1896, with the catchy title, “Why Did He Lose?” Mr. Nolde wrote, “On the whole, a good job but not outstanding. Hard to comment on. My biggest complaint is that your paper isn’t very interesting. It’s a bit dull.”

I wish the comments on my other papers were more affirming but … not so much. “Ben: I’d advise you to rewrite this paper,” wrote one unimpressed instructor. “Your analysis seems undisciplined,” said another. “This paper has some problems,” was the opening sentence of a third. And then there are the ones that damn with faint praise. “Parts of this are quite good, but …” or “Try not to go overboard with flowery adjectives.” That was from a paper on a Degas sculpture of a ballet dancer. You’d think a few adjectives would be helpful.

Water under the bridge at this point. I can’t do anything about the past no matter how I remember it. Nor can I recreate the 17 year-old Ben Williams and ask him what to say in a Commencement Speech. No. He did his job all those years ago. It’s mine now to close it all out. The last to his first.

That doesn’t mean the event or this speech will be memorable in the long or the short term, especially if we use my high school self as a barometer. But maybe what we say here or even how we say it is less important than the fact that we are here, together, to honor a moment that deserves attention: a moment that owes its existence to so many moments leading up to this one. Like the loopety loop at the bottom of a rollercoaster, it’s only made possible by the momentum we gain in the journey toward it.

My father struggled with moments like this. He ran schools, too, and always labored over what to say to sum it all up. It’s too much, really, that plunge down towards the loopety loop to capture in words. But we try nonetheless. The most heated arguments I ever saw growing up were between my mom and dad when she was giving Dad feedback on the drafts of possible graduation remarks that he showed her. Mom was actually fairly gentle – at least relative to the folks who commented on my writing – but it still seemed an affront to Dad. I guess we are all a little fragile when it comes to the quality or the value of the work we do. Especially when we are trying to get things just right.

In the summer after my first year teaching, I started what I called a landscaping company to generate a little income when school wasn’t in session. Top of the Line Landscaping, I called it. It was just me really, and a lawnmower, a weed-whacker, a few garden tools, and a pair of gloves. I printed up flyers and advertised myself as the guy who would do all the jobs that nobody else wanted to do for a very reasonable rate. Cheap actually, I would come to learn. A couple of bucks an hour. Pricing has never been my strong suit. I stuffed the flyers under the windshield wipers of cars at the local grocery store, posted a few others around town, and waited for the calls.

And they came. Turns out there is a lot of stuff nobody wants to do but will happily pay someone else a very little bit of money to do. Weeding, there was lots of that. Some lawns to be mowed, too. I built a few stone walls, all by hand because I didn’t have any equipment.

When I needed a second pair of hands, I called one of my brothers.

One fellow hired me to clear a side hill that was covered in what looked like several centuries worth of fallen leaves and felled trees. That took me over a week with a rake, a big tarp to settle the leaves on, and countless trips dragging the leaf laden tarp to the top of the hill so that I could put the leaves in the back of my Dodge Dakota truck for transport to the dump. The old trees I broke up by hand – many were rotten – or cut up with a pruning saw because I didn’t own a chainsaw. We were trying to be as frugal as possible at this time. My oldest son, Ben, had just been born so Ginger was on maternity leave. My landscaping income (odd jobs, really) was all we had.

So my lunches that summer were always comprised of the cheapest cold cuts money could buy: baloney and American cheese. I get a little indigestion just thinking about it now. What’s remarkable to me, though, is how much I remember about that summer and those jobs I took on. More by far, than the details of my high school graduation or my remarks there. I was 25 during that summer of baloney sandwiches, so a few years older than my high school self, but I don’t think it is time that explains the memory.

Maybe it was the first moment I really thought of the value I placed on my time or my work. Or what might happen if I couldn’t work. That lesson came in June of that same summer, when I had to have an emergency appendectomy. I had come home the previous afternoon with pain in my side. I had been swinging a tool called a scythe much of the day, so I initially figured it was a pulled muscle. But the pain just got worse. As I lay in the hospital recovering after the surgery, I was mindful that I literally could not afford to be out of commission for very long.

It was an informative moment. And we need those. You know this, I recognize that. I have heard you in both formal and informal settings talk about your moments, many of which you share in stories. This is gratifying to me, for our stories distinguish us and on occasion remind us who we are. Even self-aware people can wander from time to time. Our stories, in such wayward moments, are our north star. They help us find our way home.

In yours, often expressed in the chapel, I have heard the most forward thinking of you speak wistfully about savoring the present moment, the most artistic struggle with the breadth of sensations in the world, and the most unlucky wonder about the vicissitudes of chance. The smallest of you revealed a towering work ethic, and the most optimistic a profound understanding that hope is a choice, sometimes an especially difficult one.

One of you takes your best lessons from storybooks, one worries about living up to expectations in key moments, more than one has been keeping track of how many days remain until graduation, all are grateful that you know each other so well.

Well enough, in fact, that you share even very personal observations and details publicly: like what it means to live life in a second language or a new country, what it’s like to find God in the glorious visage of Ricky Valente '22, why it is so hard sometimes to believe in ourselves, or the lessons learned from a spider named Rosie.

Whether you have said it or sung it, there is a “Here Comes the Sun” vibe to many of your stories. You are, to paraphrase one of you, tougher than you know, faithful to each other and your identity as individuals, and a remarkable class of seniors.

One of you learned courage and humility from a disabled brother. Another wishes she could be perpetually more than she is, though we wouldn’t change a thing about her. And one classmate in a rare demonstration of appreciation and concision celebrated each senior individually in his Servons speech.

It is no wonder we have been eager to soak up your acquired wisdom, which you all admit has come when you have taken some sort of leap, invested yourself somehow, tried something new or daunting or difficult. The ensuing knowledge will propel you in your respective futures in ways that you cannot know yet. But you can trust in it, just as you can and, in fact, must trust in yourselves, like you have here. If Cate teaches you anything, surely it is that you have what you need. And if you discover you need more, you know how to get that, too.

Our challenge now is simply to translate what we have done here – with all of its attendant meaning – to the other spaces in the world we will occupy. You and I share this particular challenge this year, which makes me all the more mindful of the sensations that surround and attend graduating and leaving. I have heard you wonder how much of yourselves you will leave behind at Cate. I think Sage acknowledged that others will fill his slots and that he will be “replaced.” It’s a tough word. I prefer “succeeded,” but either way, someone else is here and we are not.

Of course, Sage made those remarks in the same speech that he referred to Cate as a “prison” where we are all “trapped.” Do I have that right, Sage? Language is a wonderful medium for expression, isn’t it?

With all due deference to Sage’s sagacity (he is well-named, by the way), is it possible that Sage is asking the wrong question? Yes, others will follow us here. But need we be concerned with the part of ourselves that we leave behind? Is that what the work and the time and the companionship was for? To make a mark of some sort that lingers beyond memory, like a name carved in sandstone, or in the wood on the underside of a desk?

I have been told by a great many writers that they never complete a book. At a certain point, they simply abandon it, trusting the story to stand on its own. Are we any different? Everyone leaves this place eventually. Some stay longer than others, but none remain forever, not in body anyway. Isn’t the better question then what part or parts of this place will we take with us?

Will those mystic chords of memory and affection reverberate always even as we travel beyond this place to other communities, other schools, other towns?

Nikita said after her Servons speech that she had already forgotten the speech itself, the experience erased by the surge of emotion and adrenaline and the trauma of public speaking. That was some comfort to me as I tried to recall my remarks from June of 1981. But, of course, it doesn’t matter what I said then. Just as it doesn’t really matter that Nikita summon the details of her experience on the dais a few weeks ago.

What she said was not for her. It was for us. It was her story, and she let it go. We took it up. And now the story lives beyond her, just as all of ours live beyond us. Not simply here. Everywhere that we go, and perhaps beyond that. That is the true spirit behind community. Not static narratives, or loquacious Heads of School or nostalgic graduating seniors but living, breathing, evolving renderings that grow with us and within us, that travel as we do, that we pass on in some form to the children we raise or the partners we love or the colleagues we make or the young people we teach. “There is no greater agony,” Maya Angelou said, “than bearing an untold story inside you.”

Keep sharing your stories. They are the tellers of us, immutable and immortal, and they contain the divinity of humanity, holding us together wherever we go in perpetuity. For me, that is a comforting thought.

Godspeed you on your travels, my friends. I will keep you with me always.