I PRESENT TO YOU THE CLASS OF 1984

I graduated high school in 1984.  It was the era of the big hair, music like "The Cars" and "Huey Lewis & The News", styles that ranged from punk to alligatored logo preppy.  I was 17 years old when I graduated from high school.  The world is wide open to you at 17.  I was full of myself, my perceived vat of knowledge and a boat load of dreams.  What do you really know at 17?  What vast experiences of life have you really weathered?  What view of the world have you garnered from living life both in joy and in deep times of sorrow?  What do you really have to say to others that has been forged in real life experiences?  Some time ago I was rifling through my filing cabinet, you know supposedly cleaning it out but getting side tracked with each treasure I uncovered that I didn't know I had.  In a file folder was a large stack of things I had written in my youth - poems, thoughts, etc... some were assignments for school and some were just things I felt and thought.  There it was - double spaced typewritten on a Selectric typewriter with water marked paper turning a bit yellow.  The corrections using white out still showing clearly.  I laughed out loud as I started to read it - the speech I wrote and delivered at my high school commencement.  As I read it I tried to remember what I might have been thinking 27 years ago as I wrote "Successful Failures".  Why, I thought to myself, did I write on how to fail in a positive way?  What massive failures had I really had up to that point in my life - I didn't get grand champion on the swim suit I had made and modeled for 4-H, the young man that I loved had married another, I got a D in computer programming, I had to wear braces for 4 years.  What volume of failings had I racked up to that day in May, 1984 as I stood before my 200 classmates to deliver a speech written by a green horn in life?  There were references to the era - Ronald Reagan, etc...  I smiled of an era long gone.  But, as I read the words penned by me without wisdom of life behind me, I realized I had failed many times from that day to where I stood now at age 44.  Maybe that speech was like the movie, "Back To The Future" and I was actually coming back from the future to 1984 to tell my young self how to handle failing at experiences that would come my way through the years.  The line that jumped off the double-spaced pages was, "We can be marked not by how we fail, but by what we do when we fail."  I liked the comma in that sentence as it showed me and King David from the Bible, and the Apostle Paul and my Uncle John and maybe you, that there is a choice to be made after missing the mark. That I am measured by earth and ultimately, by God, not by what I failed at, but how I lived after the comma, after the failure, the mistake, the wrong decision, the sin.   Ladies and gentleman, I now present to you the 2011 Class of Comma Living.