Thank you for indulging my reading a couple of very
old poems, but they somehow still
seem relevant as the epidemic continues here in this country
as well as across the globe.
I thought I'd read next a little excerpt from one of my essays
from the time before I was a medical student when
I was a premedical student, and when I come to a college campus
in particular, I like to read this little passage
because it's about my days at Amherst College.
And like many families, I think my family,
when it was time for me to go to college,
we all packed into the family Buick
and drove off to visit colleges around New England,
and of course, my younger brothers came along.
And when we got to Amherst College,
they immediately sensed that I really liked Amherst
and that I might want to go there and, in fact,
learned that Amherst calls itself the fairest college.
That's very Amherst.
I don't know if any of you know Amherst,
but it's kind of a place that would call itself
the fairest college.
And so my brothers immediately renamed it the fairiest
college, knowing that I wanted to go to Amherst,
and I think that shows that they knew something
about me at that time in my life that I wasn't
quite ready to admit myself.
But the reason I tell you all this
is because the title of this essay
is "The Fairiest College," and I always
read it in honor of my brothers, who aren't here tonight.
But anyway, you'll get to meet them and some other members
of my family here.
So this is from an essay called "The Fairiest College."
"I finally left the confines of suburbia,
and after the now familiar four-hour car ride,
I arrived at Amherst.
But this time, I was one of her own.
I was already becoming someone else, a different person.
The sun seemed a bit less out of reach.
At the freshman orientation barbecue,
my parents hovered over my shoulder,
eagerly pointing out details in the scenery
and in the architecture or solicitously
offering to get me more of the watered-down pink lemonade, all
the time avoiding what was the inevitable goodbye.
Huge fists of smoke from the grilling steaks
curled and rose in the air, dramatically
giving shape to the growing resentment that
began to boil in my blood.
I was too indignant about my own efforts
at coolness being spoiled to acknowledge either the strain
in my father's voice whenever he asked
me a question or the film of tears and my mother's eyes
when she studied the cornice at the top of a pillar.
My father had assigned himself the special responsibility
of spotting potential friends for me
in the crowd, which I found especially irritating
because his criteria apparently were, one, that they be male,
two, that they have short hair, and most important, three,
that they have a Spanish-sounding surname.
This third criterion required him
to approach each prospective candidate
quite closely while staring at his chest as
he tried to make out the lettering on a scrawled name
tag.
Pathetic, I thought.
Even as he had spurred me on to reach so high in echelon
in American culture, still he searched for traces
of his own lost culture, one I was glad to be rid of,
that somehow might root me.
After about 20 minutes of this behavior,
I told him plainly that he was embarrassing me
and pleaded with him to stop.
I desperately wanted to blend in.
I was actually working at being nondescript.
Just then, he shouted, squinting, 'Look, over there,
Jorge Arroyo,' enunciating the name clearly,
rolling his Rs beautifully, almost seductively.
'Now, he looks like a nice guy.
Why don't you go introduce yourself to him and find out
whether he's in any of your premed classes?'
That was when I glimpsed the name tag myself,
pinned to a colorful plaid madras shirt.
As he walked by, his face turned towards an attractive woman
who clung to his elbow, my father
lunged to grab his shirt sleeve.
I winced, yet he had not heard my father call out his name.
And my father missed him by more than a few inches.
When I had collected myself enough to speak,
my voice was quietly and coolly irate.
I stated that I would not select my friend solely
on the basis of their ethnicity or their preprofessional
choices, that I wanted to form friendships
on the basis of shared interests and not presuppositions,
and that I would make a point of not meeting this Jorge Arroyo
and, for that matter, any other Latinos or premeds
precisely because he wanted me to do so.
Looking utterly crestfallen, my father
trailed off to get us some more lemonade, drained
of all his vicarious excitement, not knowing
that 10 years later, he would be telling the same story
gleefully, almost triumphantly, taking the credit
even for first identifying the man with whom I've
spent most of my adult life."
That is a true story.
If my dad were here, he'd get up and say, oh no,
that's not really how it happened,
and he'd try to tell you his version of this story.
But you got the real, truthful version tonight,
and Jorge is here tonight to vouch for me.
So you can ask him later if that's how it happened or not.