Commencement
Address
May
18, 2014
Wauconda
High School
John
Armstrong
Parents,
friends, faculty, and members of the graduating class of 2014:
On
behalf of the District 118 School Board, I welcome you to the 98th
annual commencement of Wauconda High School.
For the second time in the last five years, I
received a distressing envelope in the mail from someone that was once my
friend. Inside the envelope was a letter reminding me that it had been 45 years
since I had graduated from high school and it was time for a high school reunion.
Now, I won’t pretend that you’re thinking “45 years, Mr. Armstrong? That’s not
possible.” But, in fact, 45 years ago, in a small rural town in Ohio, I sat in
a seat much as you do now and listened to a commencement address. I don’t remember
who gave the commencement address at my high school or what the address was
about. You won’t remember yours either. By this time next week, it will be
relegated to that portion of the memory devoted to your sister’s birth date and
the quadratic formula.
It was thinking about that invitation to my high
school reunion that made me want to talk to you today about friends. We all
know what a tremendous impact your parents and the rest of your family have on
you. And we are very proud of the quality of the teachers and staff here in
District 118 and recognize that they have a profound influence on your lives as
well. But today, I want to talk to you about friends. As my school board friend
Mr. Swanson is fond of saying, “There is nothing better than a friend, unless
it is a friend with doughnuts.”
I mentioned my upcoming reunion to my son, who
graduated from Wauconda High School in 2001, a few weeks ago when we were
visiting him in Chicago. He had missed his 10th reunion three years earlier
and was sorry about that. My son was very engaged in high school, heavily
involved in sports and activities as many of you are, though not as involved in
the classroom as his parents would have liked. He went to every dance and we
often had kids spending weekend nights at our house. He had a group of 5 or 6
close friends, but seemed to know everybody. That was primarily a function of
his extroverted nature. When he was a freshman at University of Illinois in
Chicago, when we walked from his apartment to go out to dinner, I found he was
on a first name basis with most of the regular homeless people in that section
of Milwaukee Avenue. He made friends easily. When high school was over, though,
he moved on to college and only sporadically would get together with his high
school friends. Years would go by and he wouldn’t have had any
contact with any of the kids he graduated with. His life changed and his
friends changed, too.
Although I am not the extrovert that my son is, our
experiences after high school were very similar. I left Ohio to go to college,
then moved to the Chicago area right after college to go to work. When I drove
from Wauconda to my old hometown to visit my parents, I might run into a former
classmate at the grocery or at a restaurant, but I didn’t plan anything with my
old friends when I was there. And years would pass before I would see anyone
from good old Memorial High School. The only person I have stayed in touch with
was the girl I went to prom with senior year, and that’s because we’ve been
married for 40 years now.
I know what we write in our friends’ yearbooks in our
senior year and what we say to each other when we reconvene downstairs when
this ceremony is over. And you know what, it might not be true. You may end up
going very different directions, and you may not see or talk to that person
that is so important to you today for years at a time. And that’s OK. Just because
that friendship doesn’t extend for years from now, just because you find other
people to share your most important thoughts and feelings with over the next
few years, doesn’t diminish in any way the importance of the friendships you
have had in high school with the people sitting around you in this room. The
years you spend in high school can be incredibly terrifying at times. The
decisions you make every week can rebound with consequences for years to come,
whether you recognize the consequences or not. And without the graduating
seniors around you in this room, those four years would have been much more
difficult. They have encouraged you, commiserated with you, cried with you,
celebrated with you, and most importantly, they cared about you. And you cared
about them. And whether you are still best friends ten years from now does not
take anything away from how important they have been for the last four years.
When I go to my reunion next month and talk to people
I haven’t seen since the last reunion five years ago, we will remember moments
from those years together. We will tell stories only slightly embellished of
things we did as teenagers and especially stories of people who for one reason
or another could not attend this year. We will talk about Mr. Eversman’s Geometry
class. About singing in the choir together. About being in the cast for the
play “Our Town” in our junior year. And about four summers of two-a-day
practices for football in the heat of August. And although we don’t say it
out loud, mostly we celebrate how important we were to each other for those
four years.
A friend doesn’t need to be a friend forever to be
important. They just need to be a friend today.
Thank you for listening and congratulations on
reaching this milestone in your life.
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