The Odds 

     A minister delivered the keynote address at my high school graduation. Unlike the message, his name escapes me. His speech followed the uplifting words of hope and promise imparted by my classmates and principal. He was the headliner after the chorus sang The Irish Blessing and we were seated in folding chairs, alphabetically by last name. Bonita Daniel, Tommy Deese, Steven Dinkins, were beside me in the Ds, light blue satin gowns clingy, mortarboards atilt in the breeze that blew across our football field. The Viking Class of 1985, expectant of words of encouragement, parked poised on the cusp of the next chapter of our lives. The air, electric with hormones, offered a mixed forecast of endings and dreams, thick and humid on a June North Carolina night.

     I never moved until I went away to college, so many of my classmates had been at my side for twelve years. We had learned to read together, memorized our multiplication tables, danced the Virginia Reel. These were my people.

     The minister, somber and serious, offered a series of statistics. In the next year, some of us would drop out of college, be fired from jobs, experience unplanned pregnancies, be dishonorably discharged from the military. Some would die. 

In the next five years, patterns of prediction would continue with some of us engaging in gang activity, taking hostages, and going to jail.

     By our tenth reunion, we were racking up charges, cheating on spouses, embezzling money, worshiping Satan.

     By the year 2000, if the world didn’t end with Y2K, we were destined to evade taxes, mule for the drug cartel, and participate in prostitution rings. 

     By 2020, our world would be plagued with a pandemic brought on by the disobedience and recreant behavior of a single high school graduating class clothed in blue satin. 

     I’m a recovering Baptist so I am wise to the ways of the “scared straight” epistle and certainly there’s a time and place for a stern reality check, but damn, how about a little love for some fresh graduates? I remember thinking, I’m heading to college in a few months, I just want to walk across that stage, hug my parents, sneak off with my friends and have a peach wine cooler and head to Cherry Grove for senior week. I didn’t want to think about the dark storm that was being prophesied as my fate.

     But that graduation message got stuck in my head and as life unfolded, I checked off Rev. Fortune Teller’s soothsaying, as it had cast a lingering spell upon my memory, one that I couldn’t ditch.

     Sure enough, some went to college and returned home before the end of the first semester. Some lost everything to addiction. Some married and divorced, rinsed and repeated.

There has been cheating and stealing and trouble with the law. I have a classmate doing time for selling weapons to the Iraqis. For real.

     Friends have suffered at the hands of drugs, suicide, car accidents, domestic violence, family altercations, heart attacks, cancer. The death toll seems high to me, but I was warned graduation night that statistics don’t lie.

     Some have gained weight, wrinkled, and turned gray. The gravity of time has picked and pulled at us, and there are places it has been unkind. But, that is only part of the story.

     There are business owners and physicians and research analysts. We have CEOs, pharmacists, nurses, military officers, bankers, farmers. My classmates run, golf, play tennis, and cycle. Some have been married for decades and raised beautiful families. One who sat on that field with me, back in the Ws, has been my bestie for my entire life. She’s my greatest of all time ride or die.

     What the reverend failed to mention was that tragedy is part of life, not all of it. Life is hard and sometimes it hurts like hell, but there’s also a sunny side.

     Recently, I saw a picture of a former high school classmate. She had on a white dress and was in a pose similar to that famous one of Marilyn Monroe. She looked so happy and you should have seen her fabulous legs. I had to comment “hot mama” to her fifty-four-year-old self. A holy moment of life, captured in one unfiltered picture frame.

Preacher-man could have been a sprinkler in our commencement address. He could have showered us with hope, but he chose to pull the plug and drain all good will from our football field, sending us off into the world, our bags packed with doom and gloom. Although a percentage of his predictions came true, I would still bet a bunch of Benjamins against the odds.

***

     I get nostalgic at graduation time. Pomp and Circumstance makes me cry. It doesn’t matter if it’s preschool or college, the cap and gown rite of passage brims with possibility. 

     Good luck, Class of 2021. You have witnessed much and persevered to this point, that in itself is something. You’re moving the tassel to whatever’s next and that’s something too. People pontificate about life as though it can be explained in a compact way. Maybe it can. 

     Forrest Gump said, “Life is like a box of chocolates.” I like that. Personally, I think of life as a field of wildflowers, unique and untamed. Weeds, weather, and seasons are part of the experience. And then there are days, often spontaneous and imperfect, when we are blind-sided by the magic of our own happiness. Focus on those.

     Go forth, graduates. Bloom big. Shine brightly.