Flying High

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

 Kudos to two of my grandchildren who graduated from high school this week—both having conquered brutal cases of ‘senioritis’, a severely infectious disease for which no one seems to be able to find a successful vaccine. By the last month of school every year, most of my students suffered from it, so I always ended the second semester with a kind of reader’s theater featuring one popular comedic play or another. The kids did a lot of laughing, and I managed to keep them showing up for class—win/win.

I watched most of my own children and thousands of other people’s children graduate. Students loved Graduation Day because it was the only day of the school year when all of them were happy at the same time! I loved graduation because, in the words this week of one young speaker at our district’s alternative high school commencement, “We all have wings now.” Her image held deep echoes for me. Kids walk across the stage, pick up a diploma, and then fly in a thousand different directions, sometimes proving that the world is much smaller than we think.

Son #1 was a missionary in Hungary for two years. It was an excellent choice for him. Hungarian is considered to be one of the most difficult languages in the world, so he had to actually work to develop any kind of fluency. He likes to tell the story of one Sunday when the Branch President asked him to bear his testimony, and instead of saying what he believed was that he had met “with the priesthood leadership before the meeting”, he actually said that he had just had an “encounter” with a prostitute. It turned out to be a fortuitous mistake because the next Sunday the meeting room was packed with members and investigators eagerly anticipating additional entertaining reports.

Those were the days before email or cell phones, so contact with him was infrequent. I remember getting one letter telling me not worry about the civil war in Yugoslavia, only 20 miles over the border from where he was serving. He said, “we can hear the bombs going off, but we’re fine, Mom.” Not particularly reassuring. Another letter said he and his companion had been assigned to seek out members of the church who had been driven out of their homes and across the border into Hungary because of the fighting. Their companionship distributed humanitarian funds for both LDS and non-member families, so that parents could find food and a safe place for their children–expenditures I personally was happy to support with our many years of financial contributions to the church.

Coincidentally, that same year I had a student in a senior college prep English class whom I hardly knew because she was traveling the world competing at international archery competitions. Every week or so, I’d box up the curriculum we’d covered over the last several days, and her parents would arrange for delivery to wherever she was. One Sunday morning when she was traveling in Eastern Europe, she sought out the local church unit in Budapest, Hungary, and asked the tall missionary–with the Elder Voorhies badge–who was greeting at the door if there were any chance he was related to the Voorhies family in Utah? “Yep,” he said.

When they discovered that his mom was her English teacher, they laughed and traded Mrs. Voorhies stories (nice ones, I hope!). He warned her that I had always expected his homework turned in on time, so he advised promptness for her assignments, too. In the end, she earned an “A” in my class, and Son #1 is proud to know an archer who holds an Olympic Bronze Medal.

It sometimes takes a while, but every truly fortunate graduate eventually discovers that “having wings” is likely to lead you to places you never could have imagined and includes adventures you would not wish to do without: that’s where the real education begins.