Fifty Years of Goodbyes

Yesterday, my daughter’s headmaster called her into his office and handed her a bulging packet of yellowing note cards and tattered, type-written pages. “Here,” he said. “This is every valedictorian speech given at Ecole Classique for the last fifty years. They might give you some ideas.” You see, my daughter is Ecole Classique’s valedictorian this year.

At first she looked at all those speeches and went, Oh my god. But in the end they provided us with an afternoon of sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious reading. There’s the late sixties graduate who foamed at the mouth about longhaired antiwar hippies (We Googled him; he’s now a banker and a deacon at a local church. I was hoping he’d joined a Hari Krishna group or something.) One obviously depressed—and depressing—valedictorian delivered dire warnings about all the disappointments his classmates would face in life. Some girls sound so peppy and gushy you just know they were also cheerleaders. Others sound wise beyond their years. Yet all taken together they provide a fascinating look at how much life has changed—and how much it has stayed the same—with the passing of the years.

Dani spent part of last night and part of this morning working on her own speech. At one point she looked up and said, “It’s kinda weird to think that next year my speech will be in that packet and future valedictorians will be reading it.” It was a thought that gave me pause, as well.

Thirty-odd years ago, I was valedictorian of my high-school class. I was so disliked by the administration that they refused to allow me to give the traditional speech at graduation. I was a bit miffed at the time, but that was all—I mean, what seventeen-year-old wants to write a speech? But now, looking back, I realize how wrong what they did was. Not to me, but to what should have been a long, unbroken, ever changing and wildly varying progression of goodbyes.