" ... my advice is: Go out and have a crisis. "

[ for birthday - celebrants, too ... ... such as today's ]   Dear graduates, I am not one of those commencement orators Who takes you down a series of rhetorical corridors Called "The Pursuit of Excellence" or "The Commitment to Quality," Meanwhile your brains are taking a brief holiday, And then you go to the parking lot and you find the Chev and you Think, "Quality, okay, but what am I going to do for revenue?"   You are excellent. Even if you were delivering pizza, I would see that, like when a body meets a Body coming through the rye, or coming through the trees, You can recognize excellence even if it smells of onions and cheese. Young people, you may have come already to the pinnacle And forgive me if it sounds cynical But as we gather to hail your Feats, let's not forget to talk about failure. Failure is essential, a form of mortality. Without it, a person has a very weak sense of reality. It is all well and good to strive for glory, But today's grievous mistake is tomorrow's humorous story. And one should not be a person whose memoirs consist Of notes from the classes you never missed. In a nutshell, my advice is: Go out and have a crisis. Would the Prodigal Son's dad have killed the fatted calf If the boy had graduated with an average of three-point-ninety-nine and a half? No, nor would Job have grown so wise in the Lord's ways Had his only tribulation been one or two B's among a whole long string of A's. You're much too smart and it all started with prenatal math, Your mother reading theorems in the bath, The warm water intended to calm the fetus And maximize the effect of the Bach partitas Which promote the growth of the secondary Neurons of the cerebral promontory Increasing the residuary Inventory Of vocabulary Authorities consider necessary To get into a first-rate Montessori. An advanced Montessori where smarter children are created, Where the sandbox is enriched and naptime accelerated, And every child, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew or Gentile, Is targeted for the 99th percentile.   A person who lives a charmed life, Gets the great job and size 4 wife, The starter mansion that proclaims His wealth, the beautiful children with Celtic names--- At the age of forty, a successful stock analyst, he Runs off with a cocktail waitress, Misty, Takes up cocaine and dungarees and permed hair And writes third-rate poems in the style of Baudelaire For five years, poems about spiritual emptiness and hunger: This would've taken two months if he'd done it when he was younger. O brave navigators on the road to tomorrow, Speak to your parents and ask to borrow Two or three thousand bucks and have yourself a beautiful disastrous summer Marching to a different drummer. Among exotic music and voices, foreign sights and smells, Sleazy barrooms and city parks and cheap hotels, The streets thronged with traffic, pedestrian and vehicular, And all those strange people and one in particular Who stops and talks and you strike up a tete-a-tete And gradually become a duet And you go for a walk along the Seine And kiss as if you might never kiss again But then you kiss again and then one thing leads to another And you have an experience you won't be sharing with your father and mother. Have a glorious summer so that as the autumn days come nigh Your adventures are the envy of other alumni. Forget about excellence. Think about courage. And let that audacious side of you emourage. In Paris, St. Petersburg, Macchu Picchu, You learn what college cannot teach you Whether you get a bachelor's or a master's: That being a traveler means learning to deal with disasters.   We can't all be Aristotle or St. Thomas or Socrates, Some of us, thanks to the law of averages, must be mediocrities, But we can all live with esprit and panache And sometimes throw whites and colored into the same wash And get the expensive wine, the kind with a cork, never mind the cost, And walk into strange cities and have the good sense to get lost.                                                               ---- Garrison Keillor, 2001

   

 

Friday, the 13th: "Godmother" by D Parker, 1928

The day that I was christened ––
It’s a hundred years, and more ! ––
A hag came and listened
At the white church door,
A - hearing her that bore me
And all my kith and kin
Considerately, for me,
Renouncing sin.

While some gave me corals,
And some gave me gold,
And porringers, with morals
Agreeably scrolled,
The hag stood, buckled
In a dim gray cloak;
Stood there and chuckled,
Spat, and spoke:

“There’s few enough in life’ll
Be needing my help,
But I’ve got a trifle
For your fine young whelp.
I give her sadness,
And the gift of pain,
The new - moon madness,
And the love of rain.”

And little good to lave me
In their holy silver bowl
After what she gave me ––
... ... –– Rest her soul !