Open Barr

The roses have spilled out over the west wall of the house. On a day one week ago, we walked out the front door and suddenly saw them in one long cascade of blooms down to the ground. The sun had finally emerged from the low ceiling of fog and muck to sip away the remaining water and to pull the roses out of their buds The Hydrangea was drawn out as well, and now spouted a fountain of blue on the western side of the house.

On the eastern side of the house, however, the roses remain wrapped in their buds and the hydrangea, hidden in their stems. The rumors of sunlight were only rumor. Until the star itself peered through the leaves and bushes, nothing was going to bloom. Otherwise, they weren’t going to put their trust in anything. Sun or nothing.

July has been just that; all or nothing. On one hand, you walk down Surfside Beach and several lecture halls full of drunken philosophy and chemistry students discuss the modern situation with sunscreen, beer funnels, and the police. Then, you drive downtown into a waiting parking space on Main Street. The sidewalks are bare, the shop keepers are bored, and the shadow of recession stretches down the cobblestones.

When you live for awhile on island, you become a student of the sky. We look out to the eastern horizon and consider our alternatives. Clear and white puffy clouds meant swim suits, but the white and blue clouds on the horizon brought out the sweatshirts and the bluejeans. Either we are meant to go to the beach or not; our only oracle are the skies.

On the worst days, the fog hangs fifteen yards deep and you can hear the soft love of the mildew and the slow drip of your sanity. On the best days, dawn slowly glows forth over the Haulover and the Wauwinet. The colors puddle up on the horizon, washing the clouds in glow and red, before flooding the island in light. You can lie on a beach and watch the steady creep of a shadow as it move west to east. It passes over Miacomet, then Point of Breakers, Surfside, Fisherman’s, Nobadeer, and then over you at Madaquecham. In the evening, the sun drifts through cloud to cloud, yellow to red, until in one crimson pool, it slipped beneath the western waters. Nantucket is fundamentally different. We don’t have more clouds, we have more sky.

Stand on Altar Rock and look around. On a clear day, without a single cloud, Altar Rock terrifies. Nothing steps between you and the horizon; no buildings, no trees, no hills, no distant mountain range. You don’t have any safe little frames to protect you from this great emptiness. At work, this sublime sky would get broken up into a nice little moving picture on the wall next to the Human Resources Bulletin Board. You could ignore the weather while you wrote the new top priority staffing memo.

But, out at Altar Rock, amidst all of that emptiness, the perspective in your life switches fast. The Mastercard bills and the unreturned phone calls mean a whole lot less, as do the music on the radio, the woman in the passenger seat, and the next twenty years of your life. You are no longer are the master of the house, but the faded flower on the western wall. Two more days and you blow away. A million years from now, the sky will be as blue as it is today and we will all be reduced to a a pile of plastic forks,a hundred lost golf balls, and a half a gallon of gasoline.

And on one of those worthless, cloudless days, two friends of mine were married on a beach in Madaket She wore white, he wore gray, and they served blueberry vodka and lemonade. They wrote their own vows, danced their own dance, and served us all cake. Two hundred of us sat under the eternal sky and witnessed.

The couple had met two years before and, as the Maid of Honor told the story, the bride wasn’t all that sure of her heart. She met her friends at the beach, consulted the oracles, the boutiques, and the vodka bottles, then drove back to her home. And, on her radio, she got the sign: “Jenny, Don’t be Hasty.”

So she married him. She bloomed for him, he bloomed for her, and they stood amidst two hundred other flowers for one lucky minute under a cloudless sky. They were lucky it wasn’t cold They were lucky it wasn’t cloudy. They were lucky that they sheltered each other from the sky.

And as the lobster puffs and stuffed cherry tomatoes subsided into chicken and beef kabobs and then to cake and coffee, the sun set into Atlantic and the candles came out. The timeless eons slipped away with the sun and left us with only tonight. And tonight was fine. Tonight was champagne and the Jackson Five and the gentle weight of a resting head.

We moved away from the dance floor and the candles into the dark Nantucket night. The ocean rolled as it always would, the wind blew from the southwest, and a cloudless, moonless night glowed with ancient light. The stars were richer than the constellations. Taurus, Gemini, and the Dipper were peppered with stars too dim for names but too bright to be ignored. None of the old names mattered, or even fit anymore. We linked them up in our own ways that night, named them after the people we knew, and almost immediately forgot who they were. Together in the lucky night, we made a constellation of roses.

After the thunderstorm blew through, August emerged. The air warmed, the sky cleared , and we all waited for our swimsuits to dry out. August stops the calendar; it brings corn, blackberries, and traffic, but it also sweeps away the fog and the cold water. Sand builds up in the car, the grill runs out of gas, and the lawn burns out in the sun.
August smashes the snow globe and frees the skaters from their eternal February.
Some people work fifty one weeks a year for one week in August, and they count themselves lucky.

The unlucky work all fifty two weeks, whether it be roofing, renting, or retailing, but Sundays come as they always do and the phone gets left in a drawer. On that first Sunday in August, I packed the boys into the back of the car, rolled some damp towels into a ball and headed off to a quiet beach on the south shore.

Islanders all have one particular favorite beach, and that beach marks the generations. My students go to Nobadeer or Fisherman’s. Friends of mine, with little kids and pick-up trucks, head to Fortieth Pole. Many of their parents are enamored of the small patch of sand near the Galley.

Islanders have grown spoiled by our beaches. On the mainland, families set their alarms, wake up in the dark, and drive for hours to get to a strip of sand barely a third the size of Surfside. Out here, August has no alarm clock. We finally pack the car around noon, stop for a few errands, then get out to the beach by two. Noone charges for parking, the walk to the shore is brief, the waves roll, and even on the most crowded day, you can lay your blanket far from the hotties and dudes.

Years ago, I found a beach where noone knew my name. Four cars parked nearby on the hottest day and a phenomenal sandbar developed, each summer, about twenty five yards off. Then, “Let’s Go Connecticut” found it, put it on a list that got handed the prep school soccer jamborees, and the schools of Escalades pushed ashore.

In spite of its recent infamy, the beach hasn’t changed all that much. The Kadima balls get lost in the dunes and umbrellas cartwheel into the surf, but the beach remains as it has been for the last two thousand years. On the first Sunday of the great sun month, the boys and I left our usual haunt behind Bartlett’s and came here.

I parked, I loaded the kids up with chairs and bags, then set them to run up the dune. Number One Son paused at the end of the parking area, kicked off his flip-flops, then climbed the path. When I next saw him, the ocean had rolled him into giggles. His brother popped up along side.

Unlike my son, I did not take my shoes off. His black flip-flops were on top of a pile of some twelve pairs of fading beach shoes. The sandals had been at the base of the path for as long as I had been coming to the beach, though not always in such abundance. The collection has built up over the years so that it has reached the point where someone will now take a photograph and put it in a calendar. The first pair that I remember where a long pink pair, with pink straps. They were from another generation, from a woman with a single handed back hand, a taste for Tanqueray Gin, and a secret attachment to Erma Bombeck. Alas, the beach was empty.

The pink sandals are still there. Noone has re-appropriated them for their own use or buried them in yarn for a multi-media installation. They have been joined old Birkenstocks, bizarre black rubber ones made from truck tires, a pair of sandy Jack Purcells, and several neon gummy things, all in all slow, smokeless bonfire of decay.

I assume the original owner of the pink flip flops did not miss them. Presumably, she had lots of other shoes to choose from, and probably welcomed the chance to go to Stearns and buy herself this year’s flip-flops. And, after twenty years, its possible that the only things the island has left of her are these shoes. Nothing lasts for long out here on the sand, not shoes, not paths, and not people.

Earlier in the week and at the behest of a guest, I searched for Frenchie Doucette’s grave. Frenchie was an island character and realtor. He moved out to Nantucket thirty years ago from Dolgeville, NY. He sat on the bench on Main Street, told stories, played golf, and sold cottages to the rich and famous. Two years ago, in April, he died. As there is no stone on his grave, it took some research at St. Mary’s Cemetery to find out where he was. Six phone calls didn’t help. No one has published a map of the cemetery. The Maury People needed to conference with all of the salespeople before someone had an idea where he was.

One of his colleagues drove out to the cemetary, led me to the grave, then went back to work. For those of you who will look, he is buried in the deep rough, under a pine tree.

His grave, marked or unmarked, doesn’t matter all that much. We have an entire graveyard without markers over on Madaket Road. Other notable islanders, including Doctor Voorhees, rested in humble graves for many years before a stone got placed.
Everyone who knew Frenchie on Main Street does not think of him in a grave. They think of the bench on Main Street, or Sankaty Golf Club, or, particularly, the Boy’s and Girl’s Club. In a few years, those people will have joined him off the fairway and noone will remember him smoking cigarettes on the bench.

He will have his effect yet. Two generations of children will pass through the building that he helped build and use equipment that he helped pay for. Another curmudgeonly islander, Wayne Holmes, died this winter and you won’t find his grave on island. However, every time someone walks a public road to the sea on Brant Point, Wayne will have his moment.

Augusts will come and go until the island washes away, and there will be crowds in the surf, corn on the cob, and sand in their suits. Once you get past the beaches, the summer homes, and the corn and beer, Nantucket is a small town. And in that small town, your good actions last longer than your name, your sins, or your grave. None of our tourist remember who gave the moors, or the beaches, or even the parking lots to the town for public use. Their names have faded, but their deeds lives. When they left, they left more than flip-flops.

This morning, my father, Benito, celebrated his two thousandth birthday.

Ladies and Gentlemen, parents, graduates, and well-wishers.  I am glad to be speaking you today, though I must admit that I am not exactly sure why I am up here.  When I was your age, far too long ago, I had become a member of the cum laude society at my college, but had missed out on Summa and Magna Cum Laude by dint of a fairly disastrous set of oral exams.  While I do have irish teeth, a degree in English back in those days meant that you had to submit to a one hour oral exam on literature, in addition to a thesis and a written test.  I scored well on the test, wrote a safe and secure thesis which went to the most gentle graders in the department, and then sat for an hour of pleasant bullshitting.  Unfortunately, the great well ran dry. the discussion focussed on pieces I hadn’t prepared particularly well:  Middlemarch and King Lear.  One week later, I joined the rest of the English majors in the basement of Munroe Hall to learn my fate.  The department secretary handed little envelopes to all of us.   I unsealed mine with a bic pen and read the letter C.  “C is a cookie and it’s good enough for me.  Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C.”
 
Since you are sitting here before me, eating fruit and not cookies and wearing a special gold tassel, you have not received many C’s.  There are not many things you have failed at yet.  On the other hand, I am an expert at failure. All writers are.  I have failed many times, been fired a few more, and generally have disappointed at least a busload of good well-meaning, church going Americans.  If you are lucky, you will fail more than a few times as well.  Anyone can get by; to truly do well, you need to fail. 
 
We don’t fail much in America anymore, and when we do, it doesn’t hurt much.  When I played video games, I had to put money in the game.  I needed to walk into Santoro’s with a fistfull of quarters and pump them into Ms. PacMan for a ninety minutes before I got close to the high score.  And, more often than not, after I left, Mark Z. Pesatauro tossed me off the top ten.  Today, video games have become the metier of auteurs.  Failure doesn’t cost 25 cents, it just requires a reset button, or, at the worst, a timely unplugging of the X-Box. 
 
Further, noone fails on Facebook. Noone ever puts on facebook “Got fired today for being too stoned to flip burgers.” To me, facebook is a studio audience and a cheerleading squad.  We exaggerate the victories, ignore the defeats, and find pictures of Beyonce-Cats.  Our friends avalanche our wall on our birthday, applaud our change in status, and wonder why you don’t post as often as you used to. 
 
As a result, we live our lives undefeated.  Cushioned against failure, we drift around hungry and unsatisfied.  We buy the walk-throughs, find the cheat codes, and then get stoned.  But we achieve nothing of value to our souls.  We do nothing meaningful. We are who we were at seventeen, and not who we could be. 
 
Failure stings.  It leaves a mark.  Even if it wasn’t your fault or your error, it still haunts you at four in the morning.  If you are lucky, it leaves a scar as a reminder of the time when you had to put your personal effects into a cardboard box and get escorted from the building.  In the words of Tyler Durden, “I don’t want to go through life without scars.”
 
Failure taught me three very important things.  First, there are some things I am not good at.  I am a lousy deli boy.  I suck as a waiter.  I am not a particularly good security guard.  And I don’t want to be.  Mr. Gallahue was right when he fired me from his supermarket.  I am not a team player. 
 
But now that I know this about myself, I know what I shouldn’t waste my time on.  No need to work on my cheese slicing or drink serving skills if I am not going to be doing that.  I can make that more abstract.  Any job that requires me to suck up will be a bleeding, snorting disaster. Someone is going to get all dirty and annoy the pig. I need to do things that mean something. If I can’t say “i am a writer” or “I am a teacher” or “I am a street sweeper” and feel good about that, then its time to move on.
 
Second, I learned that my job became a lot less important as I got older.  When I first got into teaching, I was very committed.  I spent most of my weekends creating projects, or grading essays, or photocopying.  I was one of those great, doomed, heroic teachers like Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society.  Then, I got married.  Then, I had kids.  Then, I got middle-aged and grew tired of trying to make The Catcher in the Rye exciting.  And suddenly, teaching became my Day job. 
 
Now, that doesn’t mean that I go to school and do the Homer Simpson.  It does mean that idiot parents, principals, and superintendents don’t get my undies in a bunch any more at Site Based Meetings for refining the mission statement.   It means that I do something else that brings meaning to my life.  In my case, I write.  Other people, compete in road races, paint, perform in jazz bands, or hit golf balls into ponds.  You work to find meaning, but you may not get paid for that work. Everyone needs something to wake up for. An ass-kicking model train set is a damn sight better than the new cover sheets for the TPS reports.

Finally, noone will ever appreciate your work.  You can’t listen for the applause. Firefighters and cops climbed the World Trade Center Towers in smoke and fire, then Congress denied their healthcare bills for a decade. Enjoy this award, because you may never get another one. And if you get another one, be ready for someone to reassign you to the Scranton Office.

But if you are doing meaningful work, it will last in the minds of those that you worked with.  Those firefighters didn’t climb the stairs thinking about their health plans and the “Fireman of the Month” parking place. The work they did was meaningful; it changed lives. it was the sort of work that you can explain to a six year old in a sentence. “I save people from burning buildings” or “I help sick people get better” or even “I help people die with dignity.” If you have to use the words “tranche” “cohort” or “derivatives,” a six year old probably won’t get it.

Meaningful work moves minds. And if it lasts in those minds, it will build a long wave.  I was in Nantucket on Monday, a town that I taught in for almost twenty years. At the ferry terminal, a heavy set pool installer looked up and called “Bartholemew! Then he gave me the hang ten sign and said “Stay Gold, Ponyboy.” The Outsiders lasted longer than I did. And he was 35.
 
Class of 2011, I hope you fail. I hope that your art opening fizzles, your novel doesn’t get picked up, your demo tape dies, and you get down-sized. And then, in the words of the great poet Chumbawumba, “I get knocked down, but I get up again. They are never gonna keep me down.” And when you get up again, say “Yes.” Say Yes to the new story, to the new image, to the new medium, to the new school, the new career, even the new train table. Let someone else say “No.” The straightest line is a journey of thousand tacks, a thousand fails, and thousand yeses.

I passed New Year’s Eve in the dark on a wet road in Vermont. The sky hung low and starless overhead, the snow and ice dripped from the roofs, and the roadway sank to mud beneath our feet. It was a night like any other, and it was not.

This night judges you. Under the winter sky, the confessional box opens and there I am. I could be alone with Ben, Jerry, and Dick Clark on any other night, and the time would click by. But on this night, I mentally look at where I am, list it all up, and then take a look at the man in the glass.

Everything I needed to know about modern teaching, I learned in a factory. In the summer of my eighteenth year, I made plastic drink stirrers on the night shift at Spir-In Incorporated. I spent the night sitting next to machines that made McDonald’s coffee stirrers, olive swords, and steak sticks. The shift began at eleven in the evening and ran until seven in the morning. I got a ten minute coffee break at one, a twenty minute lunch at three, and another coffee break at five. Then, as dawn broke and Robert J. Lurtsema played his birdcalls, I left the factory floor and went home to bed.
Millwork ain’t easy and millwork ain’t hard. For the first hour of the shift, I raced to figure out the music and rhythm of the machine. Once I had the dance down, I was able to open a book and read through the hours, all the while tending to the needs of the conveyor belts and grinders. At the end of the night, the machine and I had filled a skid or two of forgettable and eternal plastic.

For Thanksgiving, I have sent my graduating seniors on a trip. Right now, they are not going to college, they are not headed to careers, they are going to Vegas. I have set them up: a thousand bucks in their pocket, a return flight, and a white Kia Rio to go styling in.

And they want to chill in the hotel room and watch HBO.