Prize Day Remarks
Jamie Napier
University High School of Indiana
May 27, 2011
Good morning University High School. Good morning class of 2011. I've never shared this bit of memory with you, two unrelated events that match up only by coincidence. You 34 will always have a bit of special meaning to me personally. August 2007, my daughter Rhys was born within minutes of you starting school as brand new high school students. I have had the opportunity to watch her development and your development over the past 3-years and 9-months as parallels. It brings us in her words to to-now. If there is tomorrow and tonight and today, then there is also to-now and to-yesterday.
There is a title for my talk this morning, but I will wait to the end to say what it is.
Here in this place dedicated to expanding hearts and minds, I wonder often about the job we do. The ‘we' is not the ‘we' of the faculty; it is the ‘we' of the entirety of this place. You have been formed and transformed by it. So have I. Every moment of every day that we stand together in its midst has effects. These effects accumulate into summations and habits. Your life, here in this place within these walls; this space crafted to our expansion is a series of moments, shifting from possibility into memory. My description may seem dramatic, but consider it against the title given to the colleges we intend to send you to, alma mater, which translates to "nourishing mother."
Today we gather to give out prizes, recognitions, summations of our memories, trophies.
There is a subset of words that we speak here at some of these ceremonies, though not usually at prize day. I quote from the poem written by Sara Talpos. The last bit is one that resonates deeply with me: Electrons whirling in their orbitals, tiny particles someone had to think to look for. You might assume these lines special to me because I am a science or math guy . . . but strangely that is not it. The lines send me back to an autumn walk I took in North Carolina years ago.
There are moments in your life when memory runs thick. You will visit and revisit some events from your past; each revisit will add layers of meaning causing each such memory to grow heavy, increasing in mass from building the sinews of connections and increasing in importance in the make-up of your identity. You all have constructed such layered memories in getting to know yourself. Such a heavy memory is not haunting, even if it does at times seem to haunt you. You are not undone by it; rather it constructs you. Your very identity is a summation of memories, of experiences. In this way, in this shared space, we have affected one another. Sometimes that affect is deliberate, most often it is accidental, all of us are constructed and put together, a passing of moments into memories that become a student and for a few of you, soon, a graduate. In reality there is no accounting that will tabulate this process, this transfer, and it will always defy analysis. To attempt to sum up the ingredients that make up ones character is pure folly. Yet in this way I continue to be as affected by the passage of each class of students as I dare to hope they are affected by me.
A story from my memory: It begins in the early ‘90s, but I will start telling it in the middle. It is a true story; at least it is true to me in its faded, brown edged, often visited, worn out form. It sinews out and connects to elements I would never connect in a deliberate or conscious way. Events send me back to it indiscriminately and usually unexpectedly; poems, bicycles, silvery colored bands of precious metals. Whirling in their orbitals, tiny particles someone had to think to look for.
I spent the summer of 2001, the entire summer, at a camp in International Falls, Minnesota. The camp was out on an island, accessible only by boat. It was an all boys camp where I had the opportunity to be the director of a teambuilding high ropes course. I was at this camp for twelve weeks away from my family. At that time my family was my wife Stacy and myself and we did not yet have any children. Two or three mornings a week I would get up around 3:45 a.m. and go to one of the break rooms that had a phone and call my wife back in Indianapolis. Cell phones were not as common back then and would not have worked in such a remote location anyway. The sun rises at that latitude just about 4:00 a.m. in the middle of the summer and it was the only time I could get away from both the hordes of 14-year-old campers and the camp staff. Stacy and I, both half awake would talk about how our days were going. But then, during July, she started talking about this bicycle race in France that I had heard about but didn't really care much for. In the early dawn light, in Minnesota, watching the Loons fish out on Rainy Lake, I sat and quietly listened to her talk at length about this irrelevant sporting event taking place across the world that lasted for days and days. Basically I just needed the sound of her voice and this was a vehicle. I learned about drafting, feeding and how the riders pee. What the difference is between an individual time trial and a team time trial, a break away, a chase, and a Peleton. I learned that cyclists are stung by wasps all the time, they bleed often, sometimes they cheat and sometimes they even die. I also heard about Lance Armstrong and how he was at that time capturing the imagination of the world.
Lance's story is not something I would retell here, if you don't know it by now, then likely you have resisted hearing it and I will respect that. For me, listening on the phone in those early hours to my wife's blossoming fascination while she painted our bedroom plum-purple in my absence (that's a different story) the word that came through the phone to me and sent me spiraling back into memory was cis-platinum. Cis-platinum, a particular platinum derivative, is one of a suite of medicines that are used to attack certain types of cancer and successfully moved several specific cancer diagnosis from virtual death sentences in the 1980's to remarkably high, almost expected, cure rates in the modern era. Without knowing it, this heavy metal would become a heavy memory for me.
You see an electron is a particle, but sometimes it seems not to be a particle. It can exist at point A, and then later exist at point B. Yet it can't travel from point A to point B. But it must travel. It doesn't. An electron is a juxtaposition of all its possibilities. It is all the things that it might be, added up to become just the one thing that it is. It is called electron transfer when it moves between two places without occupying any of the space between the two places. Lance's story wasn't the first time I'd heard about platinum derivatives.
In my story, wrapping backwards as memory folds and stretches affected by adjacent events and other memories. Stacy and I took a walk in the fall of 1992. We had just moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. "I want to work with this compound and I think it might be important," she said. "Cool! go for it." I said. That was my ever-supportive cheerfulness - I knew exactly how to be supportive and science is fun. "There's more." she said in a measured, somber voice, that left me dazed and chilled. "It is a guaranteed mutantagen." A what? "Any subset of fast growing cells, organic clusters, would be highly influenced. It is a near perfect destroyer. Any mistake while handling it and I could die or be poisoned with crazy side effects from partial brain to liver failure. Just the act of being around it could leave me without the ability to have kids - there is simply not enough known about what it does". Confusion hits me. I'll not attempt to rationalize here in this talk why I was attracted to this 5'4" farm girl with whom I had moved off to North Carolina and would soon marry, but the memory gains mass here. Sometimes you know when you are at a defining moment. While it may sneak up on you, it is no less significant. I knew I was in such a moment, but it would take me a while to define my confusion. When did being a good student carry a price tag? Work hard, study, earn awards, gain recognition, receive praise and then . . . do battle with a demon that has invisible claws which can rend you in permanent ways - that doesn't fit - that's not part of this set up. The academic Ivory Tower is well guarded with barbs of wit, sharpened taunts and sometimes-even open jeers; when did actual demons show up to roam its halls. I'm a math guy, math problems can be annoying, even humiliating, but they don't really try to kill you - this was new.
It is the case that everyone in this room right now has sacrificed a good many moments to the pursuit of knowledge. As your life is a series of moments shifting to memories, then you, the students in front of me and the parents and teachers who are also members here have dedicated a great many moments to the expansion of heart and mind through contemplation, hard work and dedication, joy as it flies from a trumpet. There is a price in time, treasure and sometimes in a memory that may haunt; but on that walk in Chapel Hill it was different. "Why would you want to work on something that destroys pieces of you - literally?" I asked that day. It is one of the most toxic, poisonous substances humans have come upon. It is a platinum derivative called platinum IV and it totally disrupts the growth of new cells, the faster they grow the more efficient the destruction. This destruction of cellular growth patterns applies to a healing injury, natural body functions, a growing embryo, and it also applies for cancer. Heavy metals do not leave the body in normal ways and they usually carve paths of destruction in their passing. Electrons whirling in their orbitals, tiny particles someone had to think to look for. There is a moment in which Platinum IV is in one state, and then a moment in which it is something else. We, as in the "we" of all humans, using all acquired knowledge that we have ever recorded, don't know what is happening during the moments in between. Like falling off a rock (or falling in a cave), one moment an event is a possibility, the next moment it is a memory. Somehow the transfer happens and one state becomes another. In the case of Platinum IV when this transfer happens there is fantastic organic cellular destruction in its vicinity. Stacy had found a moment between the two moments. It was significant because it wasn't supposed to be findable. Tiny particles someone had to think to look for, the look would grow to a study, to an examination, to a revisiting, replication and reliving.
In my memory, while our conversation on that walk quickly turned to options and our future, I was desperate to get some space to think. Near the end of the walk, we had decided to go get a dog. Because I liked dogs and because she was willing to finally concede a layer of the argument: smelly, drooling, barking things; yet loyal to a fault and always willing to sacrifice. Stacy liked cats; selfish, self-serving, arrogant little creatures that seem to have unlimited supplies of . . . grace and confidence. Here is where memory gains mass and forces one to expand. It ain't about you! Life is a sound, a set of moments turning into memories that you may cherish, revisit and sometimes even attempt to remake; in the end - you will die. But it is not about you and it never was. Your moments will turn to memories whether you wish it or not, all of life's decisions are based in either the quantity or quality of this transfer? If you shrink and avoid the tough decisions, if you let the hard work, the frustrating work, the dangerous work, always fall to others just because you can, you will have to live with the memory of your surrender. That memory will fold and stretch and imbue other memories. As you construct the you that you will become, each moment is an opportunity to make the future in which you define yourself. In my mind Stacy and I compromised at the end of that walk; we got three cats.
I do not watch the last day of the tour de France. It is when NBC takes over from Versus cable network and broadcasts to a wider audience. There is very little cycling televised that day, it is virtually all maple syrup. After a steady diet of the basics of cycling you have built a meat, potatoes and carrots relationship with a field of cyclists, and now you are offered a final meal that is all sappy spoonfuls of human-interest stories about their private lives and remembrances of the hardships they have overcome. It seems to say we are only interested in your amazing accomplishment if you've walked barefoot over broken glass to get here. The world will now judge the bloody footprints of your journey. As we are all an accumulation of our memories, I'll let you in on a secret. You can quit anytime you want. It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to find a reason to give up when faced with real challenges. You'll find you're already quite good at rationalizing failure by nature. It's very easy to fool yourself. Yet if you don't explore the option to quit, then when times get hard, your resolve is merely based on the principle of resolve.
Another reason to dislike the all maple syrup diet on the last day of the tour is not just because it is not filling. You. All of you - will wrestle with poisons and demons in your time. I would seek to protect my young daughters and all children from the ills of the future that my generation and the previous generations will leave to them, but ultimately I cannot. One day I will lie down and the future will pass to you. You will seek sustenance in a world with poisons and demons we don't even currently have names for. You can't all avoid all of them and some will certainly need to be faced. I can no more save you from them than I can rescue you from your ultimate mortality. My best hope is to have imbued those affected by me with the courage, grace, fortitude and confidence to rightly decide how to subdue the ills of their time. Every teacher in this room is, and ever has been, dedicated to preparing you for this future.
While I hope that later during today's ceremony some of you feel a sense of pride in a job well done. Know the sum of your life is not measured in trophies. You will be the true measure of yourself in the memories you make. Ultimately you will have to live with yourself. Leonard Cohen wrote, it is not some cry you hear at night, it is not somebody who has seen the light, it is a cold and a broken hallelujah. To me that means you are not constructed from a glorious set of distinct celebrations filled with accolades and obvious successes. Your true values are the light that comes through to you when all other lights have gone out. It is a sum of ten thousand micro decisions to do the right thing when giving up or quitting is always so much easier. It is building a set of memories for yourself, not some show for others or to receive recognition from someone else. One doesn't win seven consecutive tour de Frances because yellow is a cute color to wear. Reducing ones accomplishments to be served out in bowls of maple syrup is a crushing falsehood. Be of quality.
Go be you, be proud of you; create memories of such weight that the heft of their solidity infects those around you for good purposes. Let no one take that from you.
The title of my talk - You are what you eat.
Thank you.
