Bright Golden Haze: Commencement 2026

Dear Wised-Up Teenagers – 

We’ve had a good year. We so trounced our football rivals it made us momentarily sad, and Mr. Fauntleroy’s well-attended production of the classic musical Oklahoma! – or “the cringe cowboys,” to quote one of the more delicate critiques scrawled on the drama room door – was the talk of the town. 

And now it is my honor to stand before you this evening on this truly momentous occasion. The world awaits with its birdsong and credit default swaps. Let’s tenderize that steak. 

You’ve been in public school, most of you, since you were 5 or so. By the time you were in 2^nd grade, the loving and well-meaning adults in your life (recent 2^nd graders themselves) had begun a program of guidance. Scarcely had you entered the world when your future was stood up before you as a fraught, complicated, and shadow-casting edifice. Gentle adult course corrections were routinely offered like capitalized Zen Koans. Examples include “You are capable of amazing things,” “You can do much better than this,” and “All this hard work will pay off when you get into the right college.” Tonight these bromides ring in your cranial anteroom like campfire singalongs. “Have a great day, sweetheart!” is in there, too – a piercing talisman to which you’ll one day return in dreams.

But tonight, This. You thought it would never get here. Beginning junior year, there have been moments when – in deep conversation with your bestie in a remote, lamplit corner of this or that raucous gathering – you harbored a foolish hope that this day would never arrive, so precious were those stunned seconds, even as they flew. You’ve felt the strange melancholy of forward motion. 

Now you gaze about you at a scene made surreal by its deafening actuality. Is your faltering smile sufficient camo? All the billowing muumuus have gone matte in the wan blast of stadium light. The pomp; the tassel-switching; the startlingly emotional congrats from Mrs. Petrie, the Attendance Clerk; the Principal’s earnest handshake in the hallway, eyes locked – these past several weeks have rattled you, yes. It’s as if the theme park ride you’ve been lazily preparing to board reveals itself suddenly to be a widebody jet to Timbuktu. 

Your knowing grin this evening is tempered. The laughing, fist-bumping pals who’ve defined this high school epoch now surround you, barely recognizable in their ridiculous gowns and mortarboards. These goofballs have for several years been as familiar and without moment as your own forearms. Now you see them ablaze in their fleeting glory. They’ll be visited in dreams, too. In a sense, tonight is the birthplace of mortal time and stinging clarity. 

The once stymying mystery of adulthood – its mortgage payment and business dress and scotch rocks – has been made translucent by the slouching amateurs presently wielding the levers of power. They are as old as your grandparents and as wise as an incoming freshman, incapable even of the garden variety stealth cheating requires. In your short time on Earth the “grownup” has been obsoleted. You know what to do.

I know. “Blah blah blah!” BELIEVE ME, I know. It’s important, though, that you understand that what lies ahead is not a “path,” not a “journey,” not a thing over which you have absolute agency. It is a mad stochastic brouhaha. It’s the wind. And you’re both the kite and the mortal at the earth-end of the string.

Cyclonic

First up is Tomorrow – not in the grand H.G. Wells or Fritz Lang sense, but as in “the day after today.” If you’re taking tonight’s ceremony with something more than a grain of salt, tomorrow the inklings – a slow head rush of adult independence – will fill you with heat and light. Before the Goals descend, you’ll feel a world of raw transcendence, an almost spatial sense of possibility, a benign mushroom cloud of extraordinary, impossible things. Birds swarm and undulate in cyclonic flocks, whales breathe through a hole in the head, the endless universeis filthy with stars. This is a sampling.

But. Though the life to come is an uncontained kaleidoscope, it is crowded with fireproof document boxes. Yeah, look for documentation in Grimm’s Fairy Tale amounts. You’ll also be taken to court, chased by a raccoon, gut-punched in a movie theater. A surgeon will breach your sternum with a saw and lay bare your previously secretive thoracic cavity. A dear friend will pass away unexpectedly at work. While eating savory Korean black bean noodles you’ll have a sneezing attack, blasting a variegated cloud of matter on adjacent diners, one of them an eight-year-old girl who will stand and scream with her fists at her sides. You’ll nervously drink too much on a post-divorce date and, pursing your lips to hold the upwelling geyser in abeyance, will shower your guest with a crenellated sheet of booze your compressed yap will dispense with the force and thoroughness of a car-painting robot. A second date will be convivially agreed to. You’ll wonder idly about God and tachyons and yeast. Growing older you’ll recall with greater frequency that time you found your mom in the garage crying over your grandmother’s dusty pink golf bag and Patty Bergs. 

At the same time globally synchronized time zones and daylight saving protocols will govern your daily work. Seamless urban grids and subterranean machinery will support your waking life, as will the supermarket’s universal floor plan and automated self-checkout system. You’ll sign on to the habituated consensus around commuting patterns. In time you’ll be graying and shorter and will wear baggier clothes if you know what’s good for you. In daydreams you’ll cast your eye back to that earlier time when everyone you loved was still alive. In other words, “Tonight.”

These Minutes

Dear conflicted High School kids. Whatever you are going through right now, whatever your fear, whatever mountain you’ve been told to prepare yourself for climbing, pay close attention to these hours, these minutes. The strangeness up ahead is not a movie but will feel like one. Your face is going to change, your hair is going to change, the way you walk will change, the things that dominate your hourly thinking; it’s all going to change. Houses, cars, promises to keep, and file cabinets stuffed to the gills with absolute gibberish. The hours, days, months and years will fly away and seem to take something with them. 

But that’s an illusion. You will always be tonight’s you, overwhelmed and sweating profusely in your gown. At 95 years old you’ll see this night with aching clarity. But why wait? See it now with everything you’ve got. And the Day After Today? Take a note from this production of Oklahoma! 

Opening night, the lights went down in the house and the belated follow spot flipped on like an afterthought, swept the proscenium for a publicly inept 15 seconds before finding Rod Jarvis, the tall guy from chorale, the future power attorney. He was way out there on the stage apron in his cowboy hat, leaning against the wall in that darkened auditorium, thumbs hitched in his jeans. It was briefly…otherworldly. You were out there in the house with your posse, your heart inexplicably in your throat. Then Rod started singing and the place hushed.

“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.” 

Just a guy singing. Then again; the melody altered. 

“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.” 

Okay. Climb all you want, but to your summit. Or take the fork to the meadow. If you don’t do you, what the hell is the point? Congrats, class of ‘26. And hey – no funny business tonight.