Reserved Seats!

            On a warm Wednesday evening in June 1981, my 390-odd alphabetized by last name  High School classmates and I marched onto the Howard C. Ray Athletic field at Palo Alto Senior High School  to Elgar’s faithful Pomp and Circumstance March. I was the last of the four Houles to graduate there.The girls wore white, and the boys wore dark green—Paly’s colors. One of my unfortunate friends, Brendan  Ward, had been misidentified as Brenda Ward  by a school computer despite the clue of his middle name being Adam, and had been issued a white cap and gown. He could fake the gown with one of the green school choir robes with a similar silhouette, but at that late date, there was nothing he could do about the white mortarboard. 

      If I had no regrets about leaving my High School itself, I had great regrets about the inevitable diaspora of my clan of friends, many of whom I’d known since second grade. After eighth grade, these friends and I had come from a smallish private school where I knew almost everyone to this large public High School where I felt like a disaffected minnow in an alien pond.  It had been four long years, even though each one had been easier than the one before it. Glad as I was to leave  Paly, I was entirely unsure of myself then, and correspondingly anxious about facing the great void called “The Rest of My Life.” I had friends who already knew just what they wanted to do, and had chosen their colleges accordingly. The things I was good at and loved to do were not considered practical, or like anything that would lead to steady and gainful employment. (They still aren’t.  Twenty-eight years later, I’m still figuring out what to do with myself.)  Love it, or hate it, the American Primary and Secondary K-12 education  gives a person a built-in twelve-year schedule and purpose in life.  Your teachers and fellow students, whether they’re your best friends or people you hope never to see again, become a big part of your world.

            On Friday, June 5, my nephew, Nathan Wells Holiday graduated from High School as the valedictorian of his class.  Nathan attended the Pacific Collegiate School, a charter school serving students in the seventh through twelfth grades in Santa Cruz, California. The focus there is all about academics and highly competitive, so to be the valedictorian of any graduating class there really means something.  So pray forgive some auntly  pride on Nathan’s account. While my siblings and I all did all right academically at Paly, none of us were in Nathan’s league.  He worked hard for the honor the whole time he was enrolled there.  My brother Alan, Nathan’s father, was initially stunned at the quantity of homework the students at Pacific Collegiate were expected to do in each of their classes. As was Nathan himself.  Alan even met with the dean of students to voice his concern that the homework load was too much.  Nathan however, found his niche and his confidence  and thrived there.  And he applied himself to his homework with a will. Despite his academic load, Nathan also had a full social life with his friends, including his reunion with Josh. They'd been best friends  in pre-school  and the primary grades, then had lived in different school districts until they'd reunited at PCS.

            At five p.m. on Friday, the evening was bright  after a gray, cloudy day.  The sky over the athletic field was brilliant blue, the sunlight low and bright, but an impressive bank of gray and white clouds made a background in the eastern sky behind the speaker's podium. The campus of Pacific Collegiate is neither imposing nor grand as they took over an old elementary school. For them it was an upgrade from PCS’s even humbler first campus in a church basement and a few portable classrooms less than a decade before. The school consists of two low,  1970’s vintage polygonal wooden buildings featuring teal doors set at intervals in each side and a cracked old asphalt strip of parking lot on the street side.  The landscaping is limited to a small “curb appeal” flower garden facing the street, and the athletic field at the back. 

             My mother and I were tickled when we arrived to find the second row of folding chairs in the center section of the audience had signs taped to their backs; RESERVED FOR FAMILY OF VALEDICTORIAN.   As a result, we and  her partner Mark, and my father and stepmother  had an excellent view of the proceedings.  The graduating class of fifty-six students came onto the field as “Stand By Me” played on the sound system. Nathan was not hard to spot in the crowd; he’s now over six feet tall and like his father also had at eighteen, he has an absolute thicket of curly hair, although Nathan went Alan one better, his hair being  deep, vivid red.  Once he took his seat onstage, Nathan was even easier to spot by the bronze valedictorian’s medal hanging around his neck on a broad purple ribbon.

Nathan the Valedictorian

 A brisk breeze from the Pacific Ocean two blocks due West made academic robes billow and skirts flap; long hair blew across the faces of the girls  and ruffled the purple and white orchid leis draped around some of the graduates; the pages of nervously clutched speeches and poems rustled and flapped at inconvenient moments although fortunately none of them blew away. 

     There were several student speakers and a smaller number of faculty speakers.  All the student speakers left me with the impression of a small, tight-knit school where the students and faculty are not only students and teachers to one another, but friends, as well.  And that they’d gone through school in an atmosphere of mutual respect and liking.  One faculty member described the reaction she always had  from other people when she told them she was a high school teacher;  she then gave a warm speech on how much she appreciated and believed in her teenaged students and how much she’d learned about them and from them. Much might be demanded of the PCS studentbody, but they are clearly well-supported and get a lot of individual attention  from teachers who consider their success important. Every student mentioned the teachers who had demanded, inspired and urged them on; who had taught them far more about math, literature, history or science than the mere contents of their text books.  They’d taught their students why their subject was cool, and why they should be excited about it, too. It made me wish every high school student in America could have what these graduates had had.

   The students  spoke too of remembered pranks  and class jokes, and remained reassuringly  young and teenaged.  One classmate was remembered for his accomplishment of drinking half a pint of 7-Eleven nacho cheese.  One pair of speakers jokingly told the audience they had written so many  essays in the required English class essay format, they’d forgotten how to communicate in any other way. And their speech was written as thesis statement, subject paragraph one, subject two, subject three, conclusion. It featured the word “awesome”  five times in as many minutes.  

 The Speech

            When it was Nathan’s turn to speak, he too, praised several of his teachers by name and mentioned how thankful he was to have attended a school where academic excellence was considered cool rather than nerdy; where being  unabashedly smart and stretching one’s intellect were encouraged.  All of which sounded to me exactly like what a good school should strive to do.  He also mentioned his concerns about the American emphasis on testing and scores and getting into colleges could eclipse the pleasure of learning for learning’s sake, as it had in some measure for him. Especially during his senior year, as he and his parents were engaged in the quest to find the right college. A challenge to PCS students and faculty not to get too wrapped up in fretting over number scores only to lose the enthusiasm for discovery in an obsession over grades  and college admissions.  Since, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm.

            Nathan’s friend Josh sang “Old Dirt Walls,” a song of his own composition and arranged with the help of his friends.  He had such a bluesy growl in his voice  I had to keep checking that he was still an eighteen year old  high school student; he sounded like a middle-aged guy from the Louisiana Bayou who had been tarring his voice with booze and cigarettes for every year of a very hard life. I’m not altogether sure what the song was about as I missed most of the actual lyrics.

      When the diplomas were passed out, some of the girls shuffled and clomped across the stage, inexpertly learning to walk in  their new high-heeled shoes; sneakers and even flip-flops were visible beneath the hems of the boy’s academic robes. Some graduates just shook hands as they accepted their diplomas, others hugged;  one boy wore an elaborate scarlet and gold tassel on his mortarboard rather than the standard issue blue and white ones; another wore his tassel fixed to his turban rather than to a mortarboard. The most popular students were saluted with blasts from an air horn near the back of the crowd.   When the class pulled their tassels over to the right side of their mortarboards they only stayed for a moment.  Seconds later, as soon as the principal announced they were official graduates, all the caps flew into the air.

      The post-ceremony and recessional scene on the athletic field was one of students trying to find their families first and then their friends for ecstatic squeals and hugs. Innumerable cameras flashed in the low sunlight; an ubiquitous American high school graduation scene. Nathan was duly squeezed, pummeled, photographed and congratulated by all of us. Not only had he given a good, coherent and concise speech, he'd delivered it slowly and clearly.  Maybe his knees were knocking the whole time, but you couldn't see it under his academic gown.  He'd looked completely confident and in control of the situation up on the podium.

After the Ceremony

            We, meaning Nathan's family and some invited guests, had a celebratory graduation dinner at O’Mei, a good Chinese restaurant in Santa Cruz before Nathan and his fellow graduates were to be bused up to San Francisco for a midnight cruise on San Francisco Bay.  I knew Nathan’s week had been marked by stress and sleep deprivation as he studied for finals and finished up  all his last minute class projects. If all his classmates had been flying on adrenaline all week too, I wondered how many of them would last the whole four hours of their graduation festivity.

    After my own graduation, my class had  been bussed down near  Gilroy for an Old West themed post-graduation party. There, three hundred ninety-odd dressed-up seniors were given a dinner of tough, greasy and drippy barbecued steaks and issued teeny-tiny plastic picnic knives with which to try to saw the burned, sinewy beef into bite-sized pieces.

             Alan and Linda, Nathan’s mother sat to either side of Nathan at dinner, looking as if they were perched on some parental Cloud Nine, as well they should be.  Nathan himself is not an effusive person; like many teenagers he is pleasant and courteous, but volunteers little when surrounded by his older relatives. On Friday night, he was happier and more animated than I’d seen him since one Christmas morning when he was five or six. He is off to Hampshire College in Massachusetts the fall and looking forward to it enthusiastically. Whatever disappointment he’d experienced over failing to get into Stanford University was now in the past. I was sorry on his account, but also felt it was for the best; my family has a strong association with Stanford, as both my parents are alumni, and my father taught there for thirty years.   Part of what  I  believe college should be is a broader experience of the world, and going to live in a new state is a great way to ensure this; Stanford is practically in Nathan's back yard.  It breeds more independence, and problem solving skills and ultimately more maturity when one can’t just pop home every weekend. I deliberately chose an out of state school when I went to college, even though I only went as far as Oregon.

  Alan and Linda: Parents of the Graduate 

            Over dinner, Linda spoke about her satisfaction and pride in Nathan’s having reached this major goal post of his life so successfully. And about her own pleasure on her own and Alan’s account. In the eternal crapshoot of parenthood where so many things can go wrong; with so many variables being uncontrollable and some being impossible to foresee,  her dice and Alan’s had fallen upon a definite winning square. Their son, a bright, self-motivated young man, had been well nurtured and educated, and was as well prepared for the world as they could make him. He’d repaid their life-long nurturing through living up to his potential and had a bright future to look forward to.  How many parents go to graduations being thankful that their child is there  at all after school years full of indifferent grades, gang violence, substance abuse or teen pregnancy? And whose futures had been mortgaged through lack of personal motivation or through shortages of money. I still feel it's wrong that the sort of education Nathan had received should be inaccessible to far too many teenagers due to high tuitions.  Just where are our nation's priorities where education is concerned?   Nurturing our students is vitally important, and the good payoff is immense when we do.  Many other problems we face as a nation might be ameliorated if only we did more of this.

            This past week, I just finished reading Dave Cullen’s excellent book, Columbine, and it has been much on my mind, ever since. I can’t call it a pleasant read given the subject matter, but I did find it absolutely fascinating and compelling.  The massacre at Columbine High School was a poignant undertow, even during Nathan’s graduation. What sort of graduation did the Columbine Class of 1999 have, and what memories of their school did they take away with them? I hope all their good memories of high school hadn't been blotted out by one terrible afternoon of violence.  The scene before me was as joyous as a graduation should be and reassuringly normal; Linda and Alan had never had to watch news footage of a mad gunman on a killing rampage at Nathan’s school. And even more thankfully, they never got a phone call saying Nathan was on a killing rampage at his school, not that I believe Nathan ever would.

      The story of Eric Harris and Dylan  Klebold is a tragedy, even if I have very few sympathetic tears to waste on Eric Harris, full-blown teenaged psycopath. If he hadn’t massacred his fellow students at his High School and then shot himself, I’m convinced he would have been in the news for some other monstrous killing spree, by now. Reading about him is chilling;  I have to wonder if he ever woke up in the night having frightened even himself with his violent fantasies about killing and his own death.  Did he ever realize, even for  a moment, how incredibly fucked up he was?  When each of those two boys was born, their parents couldn’t have forseen how terribly they would die or all the grief they would cause. How the Harrises and Klebolds have coped with the aftermath in the years since Columbine I don’t know. But they will pay for what happened every day for the rest of their lives.

       The book debunked a lot of my assumptions about the the families of the two boys. I came away from reading it with some new-found sympathy even for Eric Harris’s parents and a great deal of sympathy for Dylan Klebold’s parents. What I’d known about them I’d learned from the tidbits of news I could stand to read about Columbine a decade ago. I'd thought then all four parents were pretty clueless and self-involved not to notice how disturbed their sons were. Given Eric's hate-filled, ranting website, and that he tried to make napalm in their kitchen on their stove, I still think it was a pretty glaring thing to miss.  As was their failure to realize Eric was building an arsenal of pipe bombs and filming the Basement Tapes in his room during the months before his death.  

    But the Harrises had given Eric the same love and discipline they’d given his older brother who turned out a completely normal person.  They realized Eric was not just some harmless kid, but they were  up against a very clever psycopathic liar and actor in his case.  He was good at manufacturing the appearance of remorse and responsibility for their benefit without actually feeling the emotions, and revealed just enough of the truth to them to make his lies convincing. Who could blame them for wanting to believe him?  

     With Eric Harris for a ‘best friend’, Dylan Klebold  didn't need enemies. I don't condone what he did by any means. But I take Eric's influence over  him into definite consideration.  In different circumstances, or maybe just living in a different state, he might have turned out all right in the end; he was looking forward to college and actually had some idea what he wanted to do with his life, where Eric just saw a literal dead end.  Had he been influenced by normal, healthy friends, Dylan, always a bright student, might have lived long enough to receive his own high school diploma rather than dying as a notorious mass murderer.