A Graduation Letter

...I am pleased you will be going to Oberlin...

...The typewriter is a sensible notion, but that's what we gave your brother three years ago for his graduation...

...I am not sure your generation believes that any longer...

...bitingly": "Yes, now you know...

...among other things, the items on it discourage lollygagging, malingering and unseasonal languor...

...Rather, they become aunts and uncles to children whose parents have attended schools in Middle America...

...A few years ago, kids your age could express their aspirations by marching and burning draft cards...

...to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...

...He also said that he and his wife Peggy were "off tomorrow to Davenport, to enable my relatives to look at Peggy's stomach for a few days...

...Irony is "an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment," or a moan conveyed as a laugh...

...But you didn't move...

...Nine or ten, I should judge...

...The reason I sometimes worry, though, is that your generation seems particularly vulnerable to Stimsonitis...

...Love, Dad...

...States of the Union A GRADUATION LETTER BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS pocket calculator bicycle typewriter sax, trumpet, clarinet stereo Dear Phil, Thanks for submitting the list of possible graduation presents, as per your mother's and my request...

...Like Simon Stimson, Braz speaks from the grave...

...He surveys the plusses and minuses of his life and concludes that they total an ultimate zero-except for a single saving gracenote: "I had no progeny, I transmitted to no one the legacy of our misery...

...of those about you...

...Does it surprise you to learn that the memory of all that pleases me...

...But it is Mrs...

...It's a sign of the times...

...Now you know them as they are: in ignorance and blindness...

...That's what it was to be alive...

...The McGraths may be among the early songbirds of a new dawn...

...Perhaps you have some wisdom on the art of child rearing...

...Now you know...

...You grabbed my hand and we dashed toward the house, the hornets buzzing and biting as we went...

...If we decide to give you a musical instrument, I hope you will sometimes play it through the night...

...Anyway, aside from the stereo, a suggestion fated for the limbo of benign neglect, all your recommendations remain in the "active" file...

...I shouted...

...Run into the house...

...O what a tangled web we'd weave...

...May the music you would make be as glad and winning...

...Also, I am pleased to observe, they remain in the active voice, in the sense that each requires you to put something in-be it breath or thought-before anything useful or beautiful can come out...

...We shall have a hard time deciding...

...On our recent trip to France we found birds in the Loire Valley who sang both day and night, transmitting a sense of clock-around jubilation...

...Yet many of your contemporaries feel they can strike a blow for the future simply by neglecting to populate it...

...On the whole it seems a worthy inventory of your tastes, talents and tendencies...

...Your list is far from listless...

...To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another...

...It is less an art than it is a series of opportunities, most of them missed...

...Instead, we congratulated each other for having achieved stability, whereas you and your brother, trapped inside the local repetitive classroom scenario, may have felt at times that what your parents had achieved was paralysis...

...I am attempting to adjust to this rather remarkable change in our life style...

...One ceases to hope...

...Of course you know it, too...

...When you stripped and jumped into the tub, there were still hornets, the color of dried blood, on your back and legs...

...Gibbs, fretting in a nearby grave, who has the last word...

...Simon Stimson," she says indignantly, "that ain't the whole truth and you know it...

...It is unusual for a parent to share his child's stings...

...art thou languid...

...Protest, after all, is basically an optimistic pastime...

...Its characteristic gesture is a shrug...

...It was as if the stings had paralyzed you...

...I am glad I shared yours that day...

...Your face had puffed up like a muffin...

...Apparently, people who have been educated at eastern colleges no longer have children...

...I agree-but what shall I tell the poor fellow about "the art of child rearing...

...One pictures ribbons and ribbons of words unwinding from our front door all the way to the Massachusetts border...

...Shouldn't we vary the routine...

...They remind one of Braz Cubas, the ghostly, cynical narrator of Machado De Assis' novel, Epitaph of a Small Winner...

...It is a terrible thing, don't you think, to count barrenness a victory...

...To move about in a cloud of ignorance...

...I thought your portrayal of the besotted choirmaster in last fall's high-school production was remarkably convincing...

...Maybe they have been to the Loire Valley...

...When I read this letter to your mother, she said, "It's nice to see the world continue...

...That's because their heads are stuffed with vague notions of "pop-zero" ecology and women's lib, and their best biological impulses are withering atop the dunes of modish rhetoric...

...your Simon Stimson was not only weary and languid, he was bitter in the extreme...

...Some of those protests may have seemed unduly strident to the rest of us, but at least they were fundamentally hopeful...

...Run...

...Besides, yours would be the fourth typewriter in this clacking household...

...Pretty soon, one hopes, all this self-imposed aridity will be behind us...

...Art thou weary...

...In fact-I confess it-you alarmed me, for how could you understand and capture his deep pessimism without yourself sharing some of it...

...He is thus "a small winner...

...The reason you have spent nearly four-fifths of your life in this one place is because your mother and I feared the ill effects of transiency, not wanting to contend with all those psychological aches and pains that allegedly derive from moving about too much...

...So we didn't budge...

...I remember your screaming bloody murder in a way I had never heard you scream before...

...As a case in point, I got a letter yesterday from a young friend announcing that "my bride is in a family way...

...It will be...

...Wilder notes that it's to be spoken "with mounting violence...

...What you have to sing about right now is your emancipation from the town's school system after 13 years of servitude...

...I took a deep breath, lowered my head and ploughed into that stinging swarm...

...the moment they've all been waiting for in Davenport, Iowa...

...Did you see Nancy and Chip McGrath's apologia a few Sundays ago in the New York Times Magazine, where they actually explained why they had mustered all their courage and-you guessed it-had a baby...

...Children nearly always hurt in ways that parents do not understand...

...At first I couldn't understand you-you weren't exactly making yourself clear...

...Protest, it appears, has shaded into irony, a condition that frequently disguises despair...

...I ran outside and saw you crouching under the willow tree, your arms stiff at your sides...

...The single piece of advice that comes to mind is one you will instantly recognize: If your child steps on a hornets' nest, get him out of there fast...

...The choirmaster's final speech, uttered from the grave-the speech you delivered with such quiet ferocity-has always struck me as one of the eeriest laments in modern drama...

...But then I got close enough to hear the hornets angrily buzzing around your head...

...one shrugs off the burden of knowledge too painful to bear...

...like politics, its more respectable sibling, it presumes that life can eventually get better...

...To spend and waste time as if you had a million years...

...It is easy to identify a generation of pessimists: They have no children...

...That, you will recall, is the hymn Simon Stimson asks the choir to sing near the end of Act I in Our Town...

...How old were you then...