It rained hard that morning, I remember, a tropical downpour, then the sun came out and everything felt like a steam bath. My mother’s peony garden was still in bloom the day I graduated from high school forty years ago this June; she cut one and left it by my cereal bowl, a perfect pale yellow, still wet with dew, along with a note and an elegant cream box.
Inside was a French fountain pen with a gold nib. “Congratulations to our writer!” she wrote.
That afternoon, wearing just gym shorts and a pair of flip-flops beneath my silky blue graduation robe, I decided I was the soul of Bohemian wit. In truth, I couldn’t wait to collect my sheepskin and head for the horizon. Or, more to the point, France.
My sights were on the Left Bank of Paris, a place I’d never visited but knew all about. I had money saved from the guitar lessons I gave over the winter and a master plan worked out in my head. I’d fly there and stay with a friend of a friend who was attending the Sorbonne until I could find a cheap flat of my own. With a little luck, despite my appallingly bad French, I’d find a job as a stringer at the Herald-Tribune and meet fascinating people who would change my life. I’d probably take up with a dark-eyed beauty with underarm hair, who loved Gide and Gauloises.
Oh, sweet redneck youth.
But please understand I was under the spell of a famous American romantic. I’d read A Moveable Feast at least five or six times, memorized whole passages, even committed a street map of the Left Bank almost to memory. Somehow, perhaps because I’d been the wire-room boy at my hometown newspaper and won a high school short story contest, I’d gotten it in my head that I needed to do what young Ernest Hemingway did — take off for a year or two of Bohemian seasoning in the City of Lights.
My dad understood this, though the plan initially came as a big surprise to him. Just weeks before that June graduation, as we were having lunch at his favorite spot near his office in Greensboro, I revealed the glorious plan to him in detail, and explained why I’d delayed applying to the colleges we’d discussed in favor of going abroad for a while first.
To his credit, he kept his composure and listened to my big plan. He even smiled tolerantly. “I’ve been where you are,” he said at last, “and I know the restless pull you’re feeling. Every young fellow feels it in some way or another, a desire to shake the dust of this town from your feet, to see what’s over the horizon. We come from a race of travelers. But a smart man always has a back-up plan, son. Here’s what I’d like you to do as a favor to us all — just so your mom doesn’t have a coronary when she learns about this.”
He pointed out that Richard Nixon had just instituted a new lottery for the draft. A Harris poll showed that spring that sixty percent of Americans were opposed to the war in Vietnam. But under the new lottery system, I was legally obliged to have my number assigned that autumn, and could easily wind up being drafted if I didn’t have a legit college deferment.
“So if you don’t mind, over the next few days,” he calmly said, “I’d like you to apply to half a dozen schools and let’s see if one will still take you. Humor your old man, please. Life has a way of changing all our big plans.”
I agreed to do this, of course, never thinking for a moment I’d wind up in school while Paris still beckoned. I dutifully sent out applications to six or seven colleges; four or five of which placed me on a delayed admission plan, one or two of which never bothered to reply. On a lark, I went with a friend down to see East Carolina one beautiful late-May day and put in an application for the heck of it. On the lawn of the Kappa Alpha house there was a spring beer party going on. I’d never seen so many pretty girls in one place.
Why did I not end up taking off for Paris? Oddly enough, the details now escape me. On the steamy day I graduated from high school, after all, I broke up with my girlfriend while we sat in my Camaro outside my friend Bill’s house where a huge graduation party was going on. I explained to her I that I needed to go away and write, to experience things, to see what was happening in the world. I probably showed her my fancy new French pen. “Can’t you just go to Emerald Isle and be just as happy?” she asked.
Days later the newspaper called and I agreed to work the wire room for one more summer, telling myself I’d save more money and get ready for France in the fall. But then East Carolina sent me a letter saying I’d be welcome to come there. My mom sent in the tuition and one hot, still August day I said goodbye to my parents from the steps of Aycock dormitory holding a window fan, a suitcase, my guitar, and fifty bucks in mad money.
“Can’t believe you’re a college boy,” my mother said, giving me a big kiss.
Honestly, I couldn’t believe it, either. But as I told the trustees of the school thirty years later when they made me a distinguished alum, becoming an “accidental pirate” was probably the nicest thing that ever happened to me. I made dear friends I keep to this day, had a blast writing for and editing the school paper, learned to love classical mythology and discovered life has a way of giving us what we really need.
Apples don’t fall far from the trees, of course. Three Junes ago, my son Jack graduated high school in Maine and told me he really wanted to delay attending college for a while and perhaps go off to Paris, to read and think and write and generally figure out what he wanted to do with his life. Ernest Hemingway, Act Two.
This time there was no draft to contend with, but his mom and I showed a unified front on the matter, asking that he simply follow his big sister to college and get some kind of degree out of the way first. To her relief — and I suppose mine as well — he agreed to do so, but went off on his own to knock around Scotland and Iceland a bit. He’s clearly got our clan’s traveler’s blood.
This June he’s back home in Maine working a variety of jobs and finishing up a documentary film on the rain forests of Sri Lanka, having what I hope will be a great final summer at home with his pals and his mom’s home cooking.
Last month, his big sister graduated with honors from the University of Vermont. I gave her an engraved French fountain pen. She’s working this summer as a food and wine intern at a famous New England inn. She seems to be well on her way over the horizon.
June is a glorious month way up north. My peony garden was always at peak then, producing creamy blooms that could dizzy you with their fragrance. Maybe that’s why my parents chose to get married in June seventy years ago this year, and why my wife Wendy and I did the same on their sixtieth anniversary a decade ago. A short time later, we went off to wander around Paris and knock around France. We’ve been there several times since.
In a few weeks, the third of our brood graduates high school in New York. He’ll be in Southern Pines for the summer before going off to college in Rochester.
In a sense, it’s all come and gone so quickly. But as I plan to say to others at my fortieth high school reunion when we gather later this summer, I wouldn’t change one thing about it. Life’s back-up plans have a way of working out just beautifully. PS
