We’re All In This Together

It is graduation time. Here is a piece excerpted from Finding the Ruby Ring; Tales From the Heartland:

On graduation day everyone was packed into the gymnasium. Elaine Ridgely, the class valedictorian, was at the podium. Everyone shifted in their seats; preparing to be bored by her speech. And it was boring, full of clichés: “Life is a journey” “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” “Give a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach a man a fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” “Two roads diverged in the wood, and I took the road less traveled by.” Apparently she was going to take that road while “marching to a different drummer”.

Matt had been avoiding Elaine Ridgely since they were in second grade. One day back then, he was minding his own business somewhere in the back of the room right by the coat closet. This is when he suddenly found himself face to face with Elaine.

This was not a good thing. When we are children, almost everyone is beautiful. It is the years that make us not so good looking. Elaine was an exception to this rule. At age seven, Elaine already had ugly surrounded. Her eyes were exactly in the middle of her face, not a mite above the center line. She wore light blue “cat’s eye” glasses. The features of her face were all in the lower half. Her hair was pulled straight back by a plastic head band. The effect was a face that was virtually all fore head, like a comic-book alien or the Klingons on Star Trek.

She was wearing short white bobby socks, and a plaid dress-the kind with puffy short sleeves and a square of lace around the collar. She had almost grown out of the dress. It was tight on her teddy bear body, but not in an attractive way.

At that moment, the rest of the class seemed far away. It was sort of like being on film, with the background looking all blurry; it gave Matt the feeling that the two of them were all alone, in a kind of bubble.

“Matt, I have to tell you.” She said in a kind of smoky sort of voice that sounded like she was trying to imitate Kathleen Turner or Loren Bacall. “I want you to know that I love you and someday I want to marry you.”

Matt’s eyes sprang wide open, which wasn’t a good thing considering who he was looking at. A slight breeze could have knocked him down, but there was no breeze, there was no air, he was not getting any oxygen at all. He wasn’t breathing. He didn’t want to move, because that would imply that he was alive and had heard what she said.

The truth of the matter was that he would have reacted the same way if any girl, even the prettiest girl in the class had said she loved him and suggested that they would marry someday. He had not done that kind of long-range planning. Lunch and recess were about as far into the future as his plans went.

He couldn’t exactly remember how he had gotten away. Maybe she just went away when he didn’t say or do anything but just stood riveted in place. All he remembered was doing his best not to look at her or be seen by her the rest of the day. He hid behind the desks and crept along the walls of the room trying to flatten himself into them. He had kept something like that up for the last ten years; avoiding Elaine Ridgely at all costs.

After her cloud of clichés, to end the speech, Elaine read a poem from English class by the old priest John Donne:

No one is an Island entire of itself;

Every one is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main;

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,

as well as if a Promontory were,

as well as if a house full of your friends

or if your own house were.

Anyone’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in Humankind,

So therefore never ask to know for whom the bell tolls…

it tolls for thee.

It was almost silent in the gymnasium as she left the podium, because for an instant, just an instant, almost everyone felt it. Almost everyone momentarily grasped that they were not alone but part of something beyond themselves. They realized that no one is an island. A few tears fell, but then something, a cough, a giggle, the squeak of a chair, broke the spell. Polite applause came from the parents and students. Then the program moved on.

Earlier in the week, the Senior High mixed chorus had been mixing it up down in the choir room. There is something about singing together, something about performing together, maybe sharing the fear of having to perform, something about all of that, binds people together. It brings them closer than they would be otherwise. The choir was rehearsing for graduation, but also just singing through some of the old stuff.

They sang “Try to remember, the kind of September…” from “The Fantastiks”; and as they did, all of a sudden it all came flooding back: reuniting every fall for school after being away for the summer, all the new beginnings of each school year, all those days, when the future always seemed so open. There are tears in the alto section. “Try to remember and if you remember, then follow.” But one has to ask: “Follow where? Follow what? Follow whom?”

Then the choir got out the other one. There is a grand introduction at the piano: big monstrous chords, and then they sing: “No one is an Island, No one stands alone”. At this point, the entire alto section falls apart. Some of them have to leave the room in tears. They are crying because the island is breaking up into little pieces. These young folk, who, for the most part, were always able to leave each other in the spring but then find each other again in the fall, they will scatter. Some of them will never see each other again. No one is an Island. But there is also the sad truth which is that they really are islands even if they don’t want to be. They are still separate individuals and very much alone.

Elsewhere in the high school, Mrs. Walters was still trying to teach English class. Matt had lost track of what the class is studying. Instead he has been making a detailed study of Barbara’s left ear. It is a pretty ear. She has her straight blond hair pushed behind it just on that one side; not on both sides, which would look geeky, but just on the one side, which looks chic and continental. The rest of the girl is just as good.

One day, during a class discussion, Barbara explained to the class that she did not believe in God. This made her completely exotic in Matt’s eyes. Baby, YOU are one of the main reasons I do believe in God! But Matt didn’t really know how to bridge the gap between them. It was only six feet, but it might as well be Lake Okoboji or the Mississippi River. They are islands.

Just then, the teacher calls on him to read. They have been reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the teacher wants Matt to read the dialogue from the end of the book. He will read the part of Robert Jordan who is an American caught up in the Spanish Civil War. He is caught up in somebody else’s civil war, one would guess, because he believes that no one is an island. In the end, Jordan is fatally wounded and the girl that he loves, Maria, wants to stay behind and die with him. He insists that she must go on and live and escape the advancing patrol.

Please, please, please, Matt was more or less praying to the teacher. Pick Barbara to read Maria’s part. Please.” The teacher picked Elaine Ridgely.

The words that Robert Jordan uses to tell Maria she must go sound like an echo of something that Hemingway has heard or read elsewhere. The language is formal, as if he is trying to make English sound like Spanish.

They read the passage. Robert and Maria go back and forth. He trying to get her to escape. Her trying to get him to let her stay. He tells her that he will always be with her. No one is an island. It is the theme of his life, and his death. The bell tolls for him.

All of which is to say that there was less separating Matt from Barbara the pretty blonde girl than he thinks there is. Actually there was also less separating him and Elaine Ridgely than he would have liked; just as there was not much keeping Roberto and Maria apart, not much of a literary gap between Ernest Hemingway and John Donne, and not much dividing us from all who share the planet. We are all in this together.