I recently read a memoir by the well-known novelist John Irving '61 entitled The Imaginary Girlfriend. His career at Exeter was very difficult because he is dyslexic, and when he attended the Academy there were few means for diagnosing dyslexia and coping with it. Irving writes:
To say that Exeter was hard for me is an understatement. I was the only student in my Genetics class who failed to control his fruit-fly experiment. The red eyes and the white eyes were interbreeding so rapidly that I lost track of the generations; I attempted to dispose of the evidence in the drinking fountain outside of the lab-not knowing that fruit flies could live (and breed) for days in the water pipes. When the unusable drinking fountain was declared "contaminated"-it was literally crawling with wet fruit flies-I crawled forth and made my confession.
What pulled John Irving through Exeter, his memoir reveals, was a healthy dose of the passion and love and humor of his wrestling coach, Ted Seabrooke. Seabrooke was candid with Irving that as a wrestler he would never be much better than "halfway decent" and that he was not very talented. But Seabrooke added, " 'Talent is overrated. That you're not very talented needn't be the end of it.' "
Seabrooke convinced Irving that he was an underdog and, with a touch of humor that senior faculty who remember Ted Seabrooke will recognize, he told him, " An underdog is in a position to take a healthy bite."
Of this advice from his wrestling coach Irving writes:
This was a concept of myself that I'd been lacking. I was an underdog: therefore I had to control the pace-of everything. This was more than I learned in English 4W, but the concept was applicable to my creative writing-and to all my schoolwork, too. If my classmates could read our history assignments in an hour, I allowed myself two or three. . . . I began to take my lack of talent seriously.
Irving's memoir explores the remarkable impact this realization had on his career as a wrestler. For someone whose coach didn't think he had all that much talent, he went on to become captain of his Exeter team and later a wrestling coach and referee. And by implication we can assume that his distinguished career as a novelist owes much to the underdog mentality he developed in the wrestling room.
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Left:Smiles all around for Julijs Liepins(left) and Elena Stewart(right)
Right: Emily Starr-Phillips(left) and math instructor Tom Seidenberg(right) |
I hope as you play back the tape of your time at Exeter you will find moments in which you connected with friends and with the adults in the community. The opportunities for these connections have been nearly infinite.  David Vincent (left) and Student Council President Tyler Goodspeed (right). |
Some may be the result of adversity and tough times, some of shared triumph, some the result of just being together, living together, coming to understand one another's hopes and dreams and fears. In fact, if you work at it, you will find a remarkable number of memories you can call upon to remind you what your hard work, and the courageous decision to leave home at an early age, have engendered in your character. I hope in that library of memories of Exeter you find the images of security and connection that the image of my grandfather tending his morning fire evokes in me. Michelle told us in her meditation that she patted the face in the burl of her maple tree whenever she passed it; may you all have memories of this place that bring you such comfort and good fortune.
In your time at Exeter you have demonstrated many talents and remarkable depth as a class. The pages of the PEAN, the plaques of the Academy Building and the photographs in Love Gym record your passing. But the real history of your class is contained in the rich vein of memories you all share. Mine those memories well for the lessons that will really matter in your lives.
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Gloria Gong
An Ode to Joy
Love is the subject of this painterly meditation by Gloria Gong, a day student from Madbury, NH: love of language, of family, of God and of life itself.
The morning sunlight was very warm on my parents' white comforter. We all lie on my parents' bed, my back against my sister, Angela; my brothers, Benjamin and Jacob, nestled against my legs; and my mom was reading out loud to us, our poem to memorize for the month: "We shall not cease from exploration." Then there was a month of mornings like that, all of us lying lazy-tired against each other's warm backs, murmuring the words after my mom while a lattice of sunlight-through-lace drifted across the walls of her room.
That must have been a long time ago before high school, when we all had time in the mornings to memorize a poem and say a family prayer together before putting on our backpacks and going out to the bus stop. I've been seeing the farther ends of the days now. When I started high school my mom became the seminary teacher, and we started waking up at 5:30 to go to seminary. When it's snowy and a full moon, I fall asleep with my head in a puddle of moonlight. I wake up on Sundays to the morning light snagging on a pattern of ice on my skylight, and I think, confusedly, that I must have been exhaling diamonds during the night. . . .
All the light I've loved:
Evening light. Around the bend after the bus stop at the top of the road, it turns the tree trunks red, burgundy, dazzle, and the whole world is beautiful in the cupped hand of the hills.
Night light. I drive home from dropping Diana off after long school days, turning down the dirt road past the horse barn where some lights are on. But past the barn there aren't any lights but the moon's lights between the dark shadows of the trees, terrible things. I switch the car headlights off and watch the shadows become deep space, the moonlight lying like islands. I flicker from one to the next, being and unbeing, and the white meadow running alongside me behind the bars of the trees' glow.
Summer light, yellow-gold. Once, eighth-grade summer, I lay on my back in the Queen Anne's lace and brushed the bugs from my legs as I watched the sky come closer and closer through the tall stems and flower clouds.
All the light I've ever known, all the words I've ever loved.
My dad used to lie in the hallway outside our bedroom door in Kentucky and read out loud to us. His voice is in my bones, the cadence and rhythm of his stories and words. My mom sat next to him, choosing parts for us from Ivanhoe, from David and Matthew and Shakespeare and Frost. Their voices are in the seat of my stomach and the base of my brain, their words sink through my throat, settle near my heart.
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Andrew Kohler
'Things Are Always About to Be Gone'
A winter walk along Swasey Parkway inspired this sophisticated meditation on art, melancholy and the future perfect tense by Andrew Kohler, a three-year student from Mercer Island, WA.
It is a beautiful winter day, although in the middle of what people tell me has been the worst cold spell they can remember in years of living in New England. Still, I do not let the biting air deter me, and insulating myself in scarf, hat and gloves I leave my heated dorm room and walk out, alone, toward Swasey Parkway.
Evening is approaching, and the sky is taking on the almost syrupy pale pink texture it usually gets on clear days at this hour-more so, oddly, in the dreary winter. Because of the cold, I imagine, Swasey is not very crowded. I don't see anyone else on the walkway, but there are a few people out on the ice by the fishing huts. I intend to go up at least to the bend in the river, perhaps a little farther, because it is from there that I can see the town of Exeter framed against the gauzy sky. I stand there for a while, not minding the cold so much anymore, looking at the picture in front of me, and at the bare trees, silhouetted against the sky, that seem to be frozen in slumber as their roots are covered by a blanket of old snow. I stare at all of this trying very hard to absorb it, although I know I will never be able to absorb it enough.
I wish I could be content to stand silently beholding the scene in front of me, but I am troubled as I look at it. Beauty, like so many things, is a source of anxiety in my life. I have been born with this vexing condition, so that I am not able simply to stand in a moment and enjoy it, I have to try to capture it and make sense of it, shape it into something physical, either through my words or in the sounds I can bring out of a piano. As an artist it is necessary for me to be constantly vigilant, aware of everything around me and the meaning that lies beneath what people do. . . Artists try to capture the moments of pain as much as the ones of joy, grappling to find the beauty and meaning even in those. I don't know if I can articulate why this is so for me and for so many others, but I wonder sometimes if I am depressed because I am an artist or an artist because I am depressed. Both of them make me feel apart.
[But] who does not feel the evanescence of a sunset, who does not cringe when something good draws to an end, fixatedly counting the moments remaining? Things are always about to be gone. I have an uncanny love of the future perfect tense, "it will have happened." The future perfect expresses an action of completion in the future, so it is no wonder I am fascinated by it: something is over before it has even happened yet. The works of art that I want to create, that I must create, strive to preserve moments forever, so that I may always be able to return to them and be immersed in them without the dread of their imminent ending. But I know that as much as I may want to preserve a slice of time forever, I must always be moving on, wide-eyed as I await the next experience, carrying all the moments of my past with me as I go.
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