My personal commencement address

So, what advice do you give a brand new college graduate who is about to go out and truly face the world for the first time?

I will soon have one of those in my family. Allie will graduate from the University of Georgia in a couple of weeks. It is so hard to believe. The great John Prine once sang, “Time don’t fly, it bounds and leaps.” It feels like it was just last week when I was dropping her off at the decrepit dorm on a warm and bittersweet August day. It was not the Georgia humidity that caused the wetness on my cheeks as I drove away from Athens.

That is such a wonderful stage of life, a time full of wonder and anticipation and fear and excitement. A time of being on your own, of finding new friends and experiences and eating pizza five times a week. I am so proud of her for how she handled things. I got no phone calls in the middle of the night from the Athens police, never had to post bail or hunt down a male student to deliver justice.

Oh sure, there were some emergencies – a broken foot here, a fender bender there. There were some calls looking for advice, or guidance, or money – well, mostly money – but I don’t mind those. I’ll let you in on a secret about dads, we actually sort of like those kinds of calls. It makes us feel useful.

She made a lot of great friends and did a lot of meaningful work through Navigators, an on-campus ministry, in which her brother David is also active. She went to football games in the country’s greatest stadium, went to parties and dances and cookouts, spent long nights writing papers she’d put off doing and lazy days swinging in a hammock and reading. I am intensely jealous.

But, now what? Here comes the real world, the world of payments and commutes and idiot bosses and premature gray hair. The thought of leaving behind those friends and that social scene has to be frightening. I know it was for me, and I didn’t have nearly the collegiate experience she did. I was only at UGA for two years and lived off-campus with a group of fellow slackers and derelicts known as my friends.

I was completely unprepared for life as my college career ended. I guess my strategy was if I didn’t think about it, it wouldn’t be real. I mean, I had things pretty good. I had a lot of friends, I had my own apartment, I was playing drums in a band, and I was living in Athens, Ga., a town blessed by God and populated by lots of pretty girls. Why would I look forward to leaving that?

And then, about two weeks before graduation, I was at home on the weekend and my dad said “What are you going to do when you graduate?”

I said, “I dunno.”

He said, “Well, I know what you’re NOT going to do, and that’s just sit around here and do nothing. Go find a job.”

Thus ended our one and only conversation about my career prospects. I went out, and got a job, and have had one (mostly) ever since. Some have been good, some have been bad. Some paid me a lot of money, some paid me less than a sharecropper. I have had bosses who were great and I’ve had bosses who shouldn’t be in charge of an outhouse. It’s life.

This is not easy for a parent. On the one hand, you want your child to earn money. You want them to be able to support themselves and pay for their own car insurance and life insurance and cell phone bill and..hang on, I need to wipe the drool off my face.

But you don’t want them to make the same mistakes you have made. You don’t want them driving home from work and wondering if what they’re doing is positively impacting anyone, anywhere. You don’t want them waking up with a stomachache thinking about what they’ll be doing for the next eight hours. And you don’t want them one day to be filled with regret, asking themselves “How did I get here?”

So here’s what I will say, to my kids and to anybody in the same spot who will listen – figure out what you love to do, and find a way to do it. That is simple, but difficult – much like losing weight. Don’t take the path of least resistance. Don’t give up your ideals and dreams just because it’s not easy. (This works better if you play inspirational music while you’re reading, like maybe the theme from “Chariots of Fire”).

Will it be wonderful if this career path offers insurance and enough money so that you can live on your own and not have to eat like Oliver Twist? Well, yes. But never do anything just for the money. Keep the faith, don’t quit, and never forget who you are, and how you were raised, and what you have become. I promise if you do that, we’ll all be all right.

Repairing my reputation

I have never really considered myself much of a handy man. Nor has anyone who’s ever known me. I have always enjoyed working in the yard and keep a meticulous lawn, but inside the house, I was useless.

Oh, I would try to fix things. If something broke that was crucial to day-to-day living – toilets, for example -  I found a way to get it done. I have a lot of experience with toilets. (insert your own joke here).

But usually, when something was broken, I would make one attempt, decide it was too difficult to complete the needed repair, tell my wife I’d take care of it later and then hope she would forget about it.

Lately, though, I’ve been on a tear. I’ve been fixing stuff left and right, and I’m learning it’s not as hard I’d feared.

Here’s a case in point. We had a few light fixtures that hadn’t worked in years. I had replaced the light bulbs – that was in my skill set – but it hadn’t worked. So I chalked it up to some sort of mysterious wiring problem and put off calling an electrician, because they charge more per hour than a neurosurgeon.

But on a recent day, after fixing a laundry door that hadn’t closed in years (total repair time – 30 seconds) and replacing a smoke detector that had been disconnected since the Clinton administration, I looked at one of the light fixtures and thought, well, let’s just put a new light bulb in. You know, to confirm that it was a bigger problem.

It wasn’t a bigger problem. There was light.

“I fixed the lights,” I told my wife when she came home.

“What was wrong with them?” she asked.

“It’s technical and I won’t bore you with the details. But I was able to diagnose the problem and make the repairs.”

“You just put new light bulbs in, didn’t you?”

Dang it. How do they do that?

Anyway, I remembered that a repairman had once told me that those fixtures wouldn’t really handle anything more than 60-watt bulbs. He told me that about, oh, 10 years ago, and I had forgotten. I can remember all the words of “American Pie” and “Stairway to Heaven” every time they come on the radio, but sometimes I forget trivial things. It happens.

Our house is nearing 20 years old and was apparently built by the first two little pigs, so it’s been in need of some repairs lately – and by some, I mean a lot. Our house needs more maintenance work than Dolly Parton. And she’s much better built.

My wife watches these crazy TV shows where people (aided by an army of off-camera workers) take an old house and within the space of a 30-minute show, they’ve transformed a shotgun shack into the Playboy Mansion. These shows are clearly not real. They may as well have David Copperfield serve as host.

But my wife will watch, mesmerized as some male model makes it look like installing kitchen tile is as easy as fingerpainting, and then she says, “We should find an old house and redo it.” I either pretend I don’t hear her or I fake a heart attack until this madness passes.

The concept of buying a dilapidated house eludes me. You wouldn’t buy a rusty car that’s up on blocks and has holes in the floorboard.

My recent binge of repairs was prompted by a series of catastrophes in January.  A pipe froze and then burst when the temperature dropped to (approximately) minus-50 degrees one night, turning our entire downstairs into a kiddie pool.  As a result, we had to replace all the flooring and kitchen cabinets and a good portion of the drywall downstairs, so a demolition crew came over and ripped it all out, leaving us to live in a crack house for two months.

A local plumber/extortionist came out and repaired the leak, but apparently fixed the pipe with a piece of chewing gum, because two weeks later I came home to find water pouring out from under the front door. Now I’m not Bob Vila, but I knew that meant something was wrong.

Luckily with this break, nothing was damaged, since no actual repair work had begun. Which came in handy a week later when the damn pipe froze again, in large part because the wall was torn out and it was exposed.  This time my wife was home and has become well-acquainted with the water shut-off valve, and we weren’t even fazed.

“Well,” she said when she called me, “The house has flooded again.”

“Ok,” I said. “What’s for supper?”

Eventually, we got nice new floors and cabinets and drywall and fresh paint and something called a “backsplash”, all of which only served to illuminate the shabbiness of the rest of the house. So old Mark “Tool Time” Williams went to work, and now the house looks good enough for company, as long as we don’t let them go upstairs. Some of the lights up there don’t work.