Kate

Kate graduated high school on Saturday. Given the abbreviated nature of the ceremony, the school posted a video on YouTube of the seniors driving up to accept their diplomas and of the senior valedictorians’ speeches recorded previously.

If you graduate with a 4.0, you get to be a valedictorian. Previous years yielded five or six; this year they were 17. This is an especially talented and driven class. I know because my daughter was one of them, and I know a number of the others. Four were Kate’s soccer teammates.

This is a father’s farewell to this daughter, with a collection of memories, so feel free to quit reading now. I do get to do this once, anyway.

She was always brilliant and funny. At one point at about two, she said that certain words meant “how-dow-dow”, and finally she declared that everything meant how-dow-dow. Deconstructionist? Yeah, probably.

When she became a Red Sox fan, she invented a woman named Yasha Picha who was related to all of the Red Sox and regularly had lunch with them. At any time of day, you could ask her what Yasha Picha was doing today, and she’d say something like, “Oh, she’s taking David Ortiz to dinner in New York.”

When I was teaching freshman English at Auburn, I figured that freshmen were just too young to get irony. Then I had a four year old who was expert with it.

Kate is reserved and guarded like my mother and my wife. I guess she comes by it naturally. She’s never told me anything about anything. When I try to probe, she says, “You won’t understand!” I don’t know much about Kate, really, just hints and suppositions.

She was, according to a softball coach from Gig Harbor, hands down the best shortstop he’d ever seen. At Kate’s insistence, we took her out and hit ground balls to her. She put in her 10,000 hours. She had a cannon for an arm—the only thing she got from me that was good. Everything else good, she got from Nancy.

Once there was a kid on third and a ground ball hit to Kate. She looked at the runner on third, keeping her there, and threw the runner out at first. The head coach yelled at the third base coach, “Why didn’t you send her?” The third base coach yelled back, “I’m not running on the cannon.”

One coach said she was the best softball player on the island for her age. Another said she could start on the high school varsity in 8th grade. The latter eventually made a horrible mistake with her and destroyed her confidence all in one game, and she said she was never playing again, and she didn’t. That coach’s name was Bruce Welling. I am still furious with him, partly because he was always asserting what a great coach he was. He couldn’t leave well enough alone, and she quit.

When she was little, by luck her soccer teams were great, year after year, unbeaten. When at the beginning of a new year, her team lost, she fell on the ground crying uncontrollably. Nancy looked at me bewildered and asked, “Where does that come from?” My dad, who would have adored her. She’s learned to lose, but she’s still a fierce competitor.

She’s grown into a social justice warrior. When she was very little, I called her “fierce Kate” because she was so intent and aggressive. She’s still fierce Kate. I can barely make any assertion without having it challenged and refuted.

Yet she’s empathetic beyond my imagination. When she was 11 or so and playing parks and rec basketball, she was a star, scoring 10-12 points a game. There was a girl named Sara on her team who wasn’t much of an athlete, but her father forced her to play softball and basketball. During warm-ups of the last game, Sara said, “I hope I can score a basket today so I can say I scored this season and make my dad happy.” Kate said, “We’ll get you that basket.”

If it had been me, I’d have reacted like my father: if I’m trying to score, forget about it. But Sara got her basket that game, and the smile on her face as she headed back down court is still in my head. She told her dad after the game what Kate had said, and, in the first conversation we ever had with him, he came over to praise Kate.

She’s intellectually brilliant, which she gets from Nancy. I’m embarrassed by all of the nights that Nancy helped Kate through her math that I had no clue about. Nancy would say that Kate did it all herself. And, in truth, a kid isn't going to work that hard unless she wants to. Where I'm slapdash and sloppy, she's careful and diligent.

Actually, because Nancy is so reserved and self-effacing I didn’t know that she was so smart and accomplished. I’m easily the stupidest person in the house.

Kate hates writing but she’s great at it. She’ll let me look at an essay, and I don’t want to write it for her, but, because my only skills are writing and editing, I can’t help making comments like “this paragraph doesn’t hang together” or “what’s your point here?” Then she goes away and rewrites and I’m stunned by the revision. It’s always so much better. She usually has had a new vision, and not just rewritten automatically, but rearranged paragraphs and sentences so that it’s a brilliant solution. I hope she enjoys it someday as it’s the only activity I like, and maybe we can enjoy it together.

But she says she likes math better because there are firm answers, which courses in English don’t provide. That was always my ace in the hole, the ambiguity.

She says she hates men, and given the state of high school boys, I can see why. But she dated the nicest boy ever for over a year and a half. He’s in college in England now. Of course I have no idea if there’s any future for them, probably not, but no one in high school stays with someone else that long. I have hope. She’s never going to meet anyone better. Once they were standing out in the driveway and he took her head in his hands and kissed her temple.

Kate is going to Smith College in the fall. They just gave a webinar in which they firmly asserted that they had planned for a fall opening, with many contingencies for this and that. It’s obvious that there are a lot of smart people taking responsibility for their situation. Would that the presidency did the same.

I really hope it happens. I’ve blogged about this before, and anyone who’s read this can skip, but it’s just too important to me not to repeat it. When I was going to college, my mother said that I wouldn’t work hard enough to justify the extra expense of Duke or North Carolina, and I should just go to Auburn where my dad taught. It was an awful experience. There was a guy in a couple of my political science classes who began each comment with, “Well, I’m from a rural county,” and followed up with statements like “farmers can flood the market on any product you can na-aa-me.” We ended up calling him “Rural Counties.”

I vowed that my daughter could go anywhere she wanted, regardless of expense. She’s done well enough to go to Smith College. The president doesn’t make statements about how the students are “products”, as the president did when I was teaching at Auburn. One thing is that I’ve never since graduating 46 years ago met another Auburn alumnus/a. I wanted Kate to go somewhere that had a national network.

Right now, Kate hates me. I can’t say anything right. On the other hand, I double her over with laughter, eyes closed, mouth open in a silent scream. We have the same sense of humor, inherited from my uncle Walt.

But except for jokes, I can’t think what to say to her; nothing opens her up. Of course, this is natural, for an 18 year old to hate a parent. I’m told that she’ll probably come back to me after she graduates college. But we’ve never been close. There’s no baseline from which to work. And the thing is, I’m so sick, I wonder if I’ll last five or ten years anyway.

Kate, congratulations on becoming such an empathetic, funny, clever, kind person. Have a wonderful time at Smith. If nothing else in the world, find what you love to do and do it. Your dad wishes it for you, because he never evolved that far. I suspect you’ll do just fine. I just hope you’ll be happy.