Commencement

 As school wraps up, I'm thinking of my favorite commencement speech (a speech by Ann Patchett).

Patchett recalls being an undergrad at Sarah Lawrence. She is utterly alone. She has traveled from Tennessee. She has no idea how to spend her time--so she decides to bake cookies for her advisor (who seems like a friendly person). This is--subtly--a metaphor for a writer's life. A writer (or any artist) is someone who feels a weird compulsion to make, make, make.

Here, the story becomes something like a fable. Patchett assembles the cookies--but the oven doesn't work. Desperate, she wanders across the road, where she spots a fabulous house. And she asks the owner if she can borrow the oven. The owner happens to be the new president of the college, who has a small family. "And--because I spent time playing with the kids--I was invited back to babysit. And eventually (quickly) I helped to create a little tribe."

On some level, Patchett had understood that a tribe was what she needed--and though she could not articulate what was really happening, she did watch her body go through the steps of acquiring the thing that it desired. The story ends with some useful information:

Sometimes the circumstances at hand force us to be braver than we actually are, and so we knock on doors and ask for assistance.

Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

And sometimes, we don’t realize what we’ve learned until we’ve already known it for a very long time.

I admire the details in this story--"sacks of flour, sugar, and eggs," "buttered pans," "a thank-you written on a square of paper towel"--and I like the flintiness. It's unusual--it's even sort of defiant--to spend several "commencement" minutes on a pedestrian topic. This is a speech about chocolate-chip cookies.

Hats off to Ann Patchett.