UDM 2010 - A Very Good Year

The UDM class of 2010 graduated yesterday; the 2010 vintage is in the bottles.  I watched the commencement ceremony on my laptop, in the joy and freedom of my workshop here in the lee of Lake Michigan, on Old Mission peninsula where the next vintage is merely tiny buds on vines that rely on so much time and so much labor to become, a year from now, wine that gladdens our hearts.  From my quiet gluing, I listened to as the name of each graduate was called.  When I heard names of those I remembered, I turned to watch them receive their diploma from my friend the president, who is leaving the university just as they are, savoring this last encounter.  

Toni was a student assistant in my office, a Social Work major, who blew me away with her quiet courage and persistence in getting though school with physical challenges that would have beat most of us.  One Martin Luther King Holiday she came with us to spend the day helping at a Senior Center, and came back to the car with a smile that turned her face translucent.  I asked her how she was feeling about the day.  She expressed her gratitude for just being able to be with the people there, people who faced challenges greater than hers with such courage and kindness.  

Chris was the president of a fraternity who continued his chapter’s annual tradition of getting their members to spend a winter night out in the cold in the middle of campus to raise money and awareness regarding homelessness.  John was the vice president of service for another group, and engineering student who I’d see at Mass, his face placid and reverent.  I’d see that same face when he worked with his group making hundreds of sandwiches and taking them into the city to hand them out to the homeless and hungry.  Alyssa didn’t just shake the president’s hand.  She opened her arms wide and gave him a warm hug.  I’d seen her gift, her dancer’s arms open in celebration at liturgies there in the arena, her body doing the bidding of her heart, a grace of her Italian culture, I thought, missing from my Slavic inhibition.

As I thought of Toni and Chris and John and Alyssa, I thought about the wine of this vintage, the result of so much work and so much time.  My mind recalled a time when Kathy and I had gone to California and I’d become interested in wines and their varieties.  Solera sherry came to mind.  Normally, grapes are picked, crushed, and the juice put into barrels empty of a previous vintage for fermenting and aging.  When the wine is ready, it is bottled.  But the Solera method (click for a link) never empties the barrels, pouring off only part of the wine for bottling, and then adding the new juice to refill the barrel.  That way the new juice mixes with wine as old as the barrel, perhaps fifty years or more.  These students did not simply accumulate knowledge and wait for their time to give back.  They poured off their gifts, and replenished themselves with the experience of service. 

Sometimes we think that we need to fill ourselves up, like camels before a long desert journey.  We need to conserve what we have.  Toni and Chris and John and Alyssa learned that if they gave, they would be replenished by the experience, and not drained by it.  And as they graduated, the taste of their wine was not simply the bright new wine of this year, but the rich, deep, experience of the seniors at the center and the homeless in the streets. 

2010.  It was a good year.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.