Teacher to Graduates: 'Borrow a Soul, Let Loved Ones Know That You Do'

Editor's note: The following is a transcript of the faculty address given to Arlington High School graduates Sunday by English teacher Justin Bourassa. Also, see the , Arlington Patch's full  and a  with the best moments from Sunday's ceremony.

“Be short and be funny.” That’s what everyone told me. “Be short, and be funny.” Well, what about the message,?” I would ask- “It doesn’t matter,” they shook their heads, their eyes waggling back and forth at me like the ghosts from Disney’s Haunted Mansion. No matter where my eyes were, they followed me as they shot down any other advice I sought regarding this portentous speech. You see, the inherent problem with telling an English teacher to be “short” is that, well, “short” is so... relative. The chapters in Anna Karenina, for example, are quite... short... yet the book is one of the best selling doorstops in the last eighty years or so. Game five between the Yankees-Red Sox in the 2004 ALCS was... short... compared to the cricket games I would pretend to watch outside my apartment window when I studied abroad in Bath, England. A good cricket match went five days. “No matter what you do, be short, and be funny.” Well, you see, the inherent problem with telling someone who performs improv comedy to be funny immediately reminds me of my very first day of full-time classroom duties as a senior at B.C. I stepped into my classroom, filled with third-term seniors, escorted by my cooperating teacher, who introduced me to my new charges by simply saying: “Okay guys, this is Justin, he goes to BC, and he’s in a comedy club. He’s going to be teaching you for the rest of the year...” Well, one of my quicker-witted, slower-graded students, who happened to be not-so distantly related to my favorite member of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, instantly responded with, “So, Justin, you’re in a comedy club, huh? Well, tell me a insert choice expletive her joke, pal.” Long story short, and please note the short-ness of this story, I couldn’t. To this day, I still can’t just tell anybody an insert choice expletive here joke. That’s not my style. Improv’s only jokes are horrible jokes, exercises in confidently delivering a witty pun. One popular format is where 185 of something, anything, really, all walk into a bar at the same time, and are refused service for some reason or another, whereupon the 185 somethings respond with an awful pun. I refuse to stoop so low as to insult you with a contrived joke.  Instead, I thought that I would take this time to share some of my best moneymaking ideas in the hopes that someday, one of you will become very successful off of one of them, and I can then access the recording of this speech, and your collective presence here, and absolutely sue your pants off and retire early. So for those of you nodding off already, now’s a good time to continue sort of paying attention.

In honesty, what can I say to you that you won’t hear from the immense support network you’ve already got all around you right now? What wisdom could I possibly conjure up on my own that wasn’t some combination of someone else’s brilliance and my willingness to spend hours on ask.com entering different permutations of “inspirational high school graduation quotes?” Well, my friends, as the New Yorker’s great Roger Rosenblatt wrote on December 20th, 2010, in a letter to his “ungrateful” creative writing students, says,

 ...if, upon examination, you find your soul inadequate to the task of great writing, then improve it, or borrow someone else’s. Commencement speakers are forever telling you to be yourself. I say, be someone else, if that other self is superior to yours. Borrow a soul.

He continues, “I am not in the least being facetious. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov says that the soul “is but a manner of being,” not a constant entity. Dissatisfied with the makeup of your old soul? Trade it in. But always trade up, and make the new one a great soul, capacious, kind, and rational, for only a soul of such quality and magnitude will produce the work you aspire to. If there is one lesson I hope to have given you in our classes, it is that your life matters. Now make it matter to others.”

And I suppose that’s about all we can do, really, which is one of the two things I have to offer you. If, for some reason, you find yourself soul-less, if you find yourself without the motivation to push forward., if you find yourself lacking in the morals department, or completely unable to be spectacular at something - anything, then take a clue from your surroundings. Feed off of those around you. Embrace the brilliance that radiates from your peers. In our constantly evolving world, a world filled with smart phones and video chatting, sluice through the  moral rubble, and appreciate the treasures of your environment. Search for your passion. And if at first you can’t find it, take note of the things about which others are passionate. Follow their lead. Aspire to be passionate about something, open your hearts and minds to even the slightest chance of passion, and you will find it. Be parasitic, with the hopes that you will, you can, and you simply must, become a better individual as a result.

I’ll break my own rules as an English teacher here, when I say that this place is a special place. It is a great place. A place where cool stuff happens. A place filled with incredible things. Unbelievable things. Passionate things. But those things are not hallways, they aren’t literary works, they aren’t lockers, they aren’t desks, they aren’t even deans or baseball team captains or students or teachers. They are people. People filled with interesting hobbies and passions and believe it or not, love. Sure, maybe the love of certain things is different, or off the beaten trail, or even uncomfortable. But who are we to judge love? The English teacher in me refuses to allow the rhetorical question, but it also refuses to let me joke by saying “According to dictionary.com, love is...” one thing or another. Love is not a song lyric. Love is not a passage from a book or an essay. It’s not a t-shirt. It is the very fiber that is woven through all of us as we sit here today. Love is this black cap and gown. Love is the all the people in the bleachers here, supporting you today. Love is sitting before you. Love is retiring at the end of this school year with Mr. Skidmore. It’s all love. But in scientific terms, it’s all potential. After all, what good is love if it goes unexpressed? Love is Mr. Dangel dragging my sorry behind up Westminster Street on our first run together last year. Love was me wanting to throw up on his shoes as he stood there chanting, “DUDE! Push it out! You got it, Push, dude, push! PUSH. IT. OUT.” as I retched at the top of the hill. Love is Mr. Sandler dragging my sorry behind to the gym every week for the fitness challenge. Love is Ms. Orlando’s eternal support and after-school words of wisdom, as well as her eternal supply of Twizzlers.  Love is Ms. Sheehy inviting me to co-teach the Women & Literature course last year, without so much as complaining once (at least not to my face). Love is Mr. McKnight dragging my sorry behind onstage for the STAND Club’s Battle of the Bands for two years in a row now. If he is the Angus Young in our AC/DC cover band, I am definitely just the fan buying front row seats for the concert. Love is everything Ms. Ortwein does that’s not in her job description. Love is Ms. Eudenbach and each new edition of the Ponder Report tucked into my mailbox. Love is Mr. McCarthy’s future self on Halloween, grades frantically etched into his face, shackles clamped around his wrists. Well... maybe that’s not exactly love... Love is more like Ms. Briggs’ cheerful Fusco House paycheck distribution. Yeah. Now THAT’s love. It’s chaperoning a trip to Japan with Ms. Bassett, it’s the most genuine of greetings from Ms. Driscoll, especially the long-awaited “Happy Friday” that I know is waiting for me as I sign in at the end of each week.. It’s an early morning run or an after school workout with Mr. Richardson. Love is everything that Mrs. Reynolds does. It’s Ms. Bradley’s thankless effort in typing up Creative Writing lesson plans and handouts, and her willingness to stick around after school and discuss my plans to teach in Japan next year. It’s Ms. Begin’s regular prioritizing those around her so that they come before her. It’s Ms. Coleman’s commitment to grammatical excellence and spiritual decency. It’s a friendship with Mikey Burns that started over lunch conversations, or Officer Gallagher yelling, “BARE-ASSA!” every time I walk by his office. Poor guy, I don’t have the heart to tell him that’s not how you pronounce my name... It’s remembering the day I first met Mr. Skidmore. It may or may not have been June 1, 2009. He was wearing a tie that looked like a giant pencil, and all I could remember thinking on the way out was “how is it possible that he can still teach a class?” I also remember thinking “Boy, I hope my interview goes well with the Ottoson, ‘cause that didn’t go so hot.” I guess in retrospect, it must have gone at the very least, okay. Love is a carpool every day with Ms. Dube, someone who, embarrasingly enough, I didn’t really know until around January. Someone who has driven my sorry behind to work every day since bravely returning to school after February break. Someone who almost literally carried me the last three and a half miles of the Boston Marathon this year, ensuring that I not only shattered my previous personal record, but broke the elusive 4 hour barrier when I was sure it couldn’t be done. Someone who as I was hallucinating Coca Cola fountains and Reese’s peanut butter cup roadways at the finish line of the marathon got me to my father, told him “He is not all right. I think he should sit down and get some water.” but then when I thanked her, simply told me, “Justin, we are good friends.”

And it’s the truth. We are good friends. And I’m not afraid to say that up until last week, I was, as one of my sophomores inadvertently quipped “pulling an Oedipus,” blindly grasping at ideas for this speech. I’m sure that the sophomore wasn’t realizing the fuller implications of what “pulling an Oedipus”  meant when he offered that metaphor, of course. But in a simple conversation riding home with Ms. Dube last week, it became clear that we thought and felt the same way about what to say at a graduation address, even if I couldn’t initially express it on my own. And this is where Mr. Rosenblatt’s quotation regarding “borrowing a soul” is perhaps most fitting. Tell the people you love that you love them. It is your responsibility, it is your obligation, it is your duty to let the people for whom you care know, without a shred of doubt that you do. You may feel like you do it all the time, but assuming they know simply isn’t enough. And it’s more than simply saying “I Love You.” (But if you don’t even say that, that’s a great place to start). It’s one of the reasons I put such an emphasis on clear writing and communicating; one of the reasons I take pride in demanding more from my students’ compositions, creative or formal, and one of the reasons that I implore my writers to show, and not simply tell. It is with the hopes that they will understand how truly joyous effectively communicating can be. It is because you owe it to those silent contractors, those all-too-often phantom construction workers, busy at the site that is who you are today. You owe it to all those people here today, to those individuals that, for one reason or another, couldn’t be here today, and to all those people you will meet as you fittingly begin the next step of in your lives. And whether that means you’ll be stepping into the family plumbing business, a tour of duty with the United States Marine Corps, a career in nursing, a job at Olympia Sports,  twelve months with City Year, two years at Bridgewater State, four years studying biochemistry at MIT, music tech at NorthEastern, or wherever else your plans may take you, I demand that you never be afraid to show those you love that you love them. So as I approach a gentle landing here, and now’s a good time to elbow all the flycatchers out there, I ask you to trust me when I tell you that it hurts to realize that you may not have taken advantage of the opportunity to tell someone you love them. It’s not a dull ache, either, it’s stomach churning, skin-crawling, feverish, insomnia inducing hurt. And it’s something that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone, as missing that chance is the stuff that regret is made of. And I’ll give credit where credit is due, and even though he isn’t in the crowd today (probably because NASCAR is on), I have to thank my father, who raised me to never look over my shoulder to see if anyone’s watching. My mother, who demanded that I chase my dreams. Together, they supported me through anything and everything, and I wouldn’t be here before you without them. To my sisters, who are always there for me through thick and thin, to my brother, who ships down to Parris Island, South Carolina, to enter Marine boot camp on August 1st. I remember he told me that he loved me for the first time ever on a voicemail he left me in January. I want to thank this wonderful faculty and staff, filled with people whose passion for their careers and their disciplines fills the classrooms, the hallways, and spills right out onto Mass Ave. and into the Brigham’s parking lot. Thank you to Mr. Skidmore, Ms. Orlando, and Ms. Reynolds, whose passion and love will be missed next year. I want to thank the parents and guardians, family members and friends here today. This day is just as much yours as it is our graduates’. And though I may grow tense and stress about you, though I may lament every student loan bill that comes in as I’m reading your quickly-written poetry, though I may actually look forward to long training runs to blow off steam because you all frustrate me in a fashion that no other group of individuals on the face of the earth could possibly frustrate me, I want to thank you, the class of 2011, for all the joy and inspiration you have brought me this year, and for all the wisdom that you have given me. You can’t say that I didn’t tell you I love you.

I hope that you have gathered something from these few minutes today, other than the fact that wherever they go, every person in this school drags my sorry behind with them. I hope you wore sunscreen if we are on the Turf, or that you wore cotton if we’re in the Toz Gym. I hope that I remember to cross out the remark regarding the location that doesn’t apply, and for those of you that think I’ve gone on a bit long, I hope that you remember that it was you who voted for me, and me who warned you that if given the opportunity, I would definitely disregard the advice of being short.

And as far as funny goes, the moneymaking idea is a reality tv show where a group of prisoners compete to have their novels published, called “PROSE and CONS” (pause). And I will now tell you a joke as only an improviser could. 185 graduates walk into a coffee bar, and the barista says “I’m sorry, we don’t serve your kind here, and they say, “don’t make us bust a CAP.” 185 graduates walk into a coffee bar and the barista says I’m sorry, we don’t serve your kind here, and the graduates all raise their fists, ready to throw GOWN. 185 graduates walk into a coffee bar, and the barista says “I’m sorry, we don’t serve your kind here, and the Gradautes say, “That’s all right, friend, we’re FINISHED.” And now, so am I. Be well, be passionate, be great, be sure the people you love know it. Congratulations and thank you.