Time to Hope

The Back to School posts are appearing.  Allow me to temper your enthusiasm with a small philosophy of three generations.

Back to School is a very bitter-sweet time. It’s like a tension cocktail: excitement, optimism and fear all mixed together. There’s a reason school supply lists include Kleenex.  It’s not for colds.  It’s for tears.  There will be a lot of tears shed in the coming year.  And not just the students.  Teachers shed tears, too.

I have now seen two generations complete the entire process including graduate school. Both of my  granddaughters are starting to settle into their careers now.  There are some things that are common to the education process.  Kleenex is one. Laughter, pride, happiness, heartbreak and looking at the horizon for sure.

I’ve watched two generations of friends and family unfold before my eyes now.  A lot of baptisms and funerals.  A lot can happen between birth and adulthood.  A human doesn’t always end up as who their parents plan when they are born.  All parents plan for their kids to be perfect and to have a perfect life. And we know that all adults aren’t perfect.  In fact, we know that none of us are.  None. 

Pick your poison.  Will your baby end up with a learning disability?  In an accident that leaves scars that can’t be fixed?  In a career that you don’t quite approve? Maybe in a relationship that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the family? 

It's a pretty sure bet that within 30 years of that baby’s birth you will end up with something that you didn’t plan.  And you are going to have to either adapt or accept, most likely both unless you want to abandon the relationship.

I have a photo I took of one granddaughter getting on the bus the first day of school one year.  She was so excited.  She wanted to take the bus to a new magnet school.  Before the year was out she was disillusioned with the bus and the other kids and the whole idea. The next year, she went back to her original school, wiser and more experienced.   But we had honored her efforts.  

But I remember that morning of her first day at the magnet school.  When I got into my car and headed home the car radio was playing one of my favorite songs, almost like a sound track to my morning. It was the theme song to “Working Girl”, written by Carly Simon. I have two favorite scenes in the otherwise forgettable movie: the beginning and the ending. Both scenes are magnificent pieces of composition, imagery and photography.

The movie starts with a wide shot of crowds of office workers on their way to work in Manhattan, walking down the sidewalks and getting on the ferry. Then the camera gradually moves into a close-up of the movie’s heroine on her way to work. The song was released the year Elizabeth graduated from high school and it has always reminded me more of our children’s journeys in and out of school than office workers:

We the great and small stand on a star
and blaze a trail of desire through the darkening dawn.

It's asking for the taking. Trembling, shaking.
Oh, my heart is aching.
We're coming to the edge, running on the water,
coming through the fog, your sons and daughters.

Let the river run, let all the dreamers
wake the nation.
Come, the New Jerusalem.

The first day of school is always bitter-sweet at its best. The morning is so full of promises while experience tells us that a large number of those promises will fall short or be broken. Boyfriends will be made and lost. Friendships will fail. Grades won’t guarantee jobs or money. Jobs won’t fulfill us the way we dreamed they would. But we dream anyway.

My other favorite scene in the movie is the ending. The working girl achieves success and the camera shows her in a windowed office. The shot is again majestic and poetic, reversing the opening scene by starting with a close-up of the heroine and backing out to a wide shot. I’m not sure how they managed to shoot it; it had to have been technically difficult and it’s just a marvel to watch. The camera looks through the window from the outside, showing a close-up of Melanie Griffith at her new desk then pulls back in a steady long shot to show the gorgeous office building. We are clearly to be impressed with her success.

But watching the movie today, time and circumstance  imposes a whole different emotion at the shot, something that causes me pause every time I see it. As the camera pulls back even farther we see the beautiful majestic building in all its glory. And there’s no mistaking that we are looking at the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

The first time I watched the movie after September 11, 2001 I gasped at the scene. A simply gorgeous, majestic building. A building with a soul. And we all know what happened.

It turned out that the unintended lesson of the movie was that even the most majestic buildings don’t last. Babies don’t stay babies.  Bad things happen. Life is tough sometime. We accept. We adapt.

And still, every year the first day of school we get excited. Because we know these things deep inside and still, in spite of it all, we dare to try.  This is the part that makes each one of us special. We throw up skyscrapers into the sky and let them stand exposed. We are built to dream.  We were made to hope.

Have a hope-filled day.