A C H A P E L TA L K
by Stacey Clover Symonds ’84, P’17, ’18, Trustee November 4, 2016 voces
A Tale of Curveballs Stacey chose “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen as the reading preceding her talk. Its refrain:
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. That’s how the light gets in. That’s how the light gets in.
I
have a really hard time believing that I am standing here. When I was at Groton, I would never have stood up here in front of my teachers and peers—too scary, too much judgment. Yet, here I am, and I have no idea how I got here. I might be here because in a few weeks there may be a wall and I may not be able to return. I’m not the CEO of a major company. I have not performed a major humanitarian miracle or discovered a cure for cancer. I’m just me. And, I guess that’s what I should talk about. A few years ago, I found a copy of the essay I wrote for my Groton application. I made the mistake of reading it so many years later. The question was: “What kind of a person are you? How would you describe yourself?” I cringe as I tell you the opening line, but here goes— “I would describe myself as a citizen of the world.” Really? I was thirteen. I had lived in New York City, Houston, and Paris in very privileged contexts. And I had the hubris to consider myself a citizen of the world. Sometimes, though, teens are more perceptive than we give them credit for. My essay might just have been a message to my future self of the change that I would have
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to undertake to survive—of the necessity both of being true to myself and engaging with the world in which we live. In some ways, this essay was a forewarning of the many curveballs of life. Today’s talk is a tale of curveballs. I don’t know much about baseball, but the image of a curveball seems the most adequate for the way life comes at us. It never happens in a straight line. First curveball:
As a small child, I lived in a perfect world. But as I was starting Groton, my world had just imploded. My parents had had a nasty divorce and subsequent custody battle. My father and idol had been forbidden to see me by his new wife, and my mother had pretty much decided that she would rather be in France than at home with me. The message seemed quite clear to my thirteen-year-old self. You’re on your own. I came to Groton Revisit Day and immediately felt the home and support I was missing. We spent the night at a faculty house (there were only twenty girls in my form) and I stayed up all night talking to my future roommate and the person who would become my soulmate and the godmother of my first child. Imagine my total embarrassment when, the next morning, I fell asleep in Mr. Polk’s Bible class! He just laughed and asked how I was—blowing me out of the water with his sideways smile. If I could survive that, I knew that Groton was the place for me. I came with high hopes. Groton was more than good to me, although I must admit that not every day was perfect—far from it. I wasn’t the popular one. I wasn’t cool. I wasn’t the star athlete. But I found my space and my passions and created a future that I was looking for.