I hope you dance, ten years later

‘Tis the season for graduations, for flapping robes and square mortarboards, for colorfully archaic hoods and regalia. I’m a bit removed, personally, from all the beginnings and endings this year. But I work on a college campus (in Boston, that most densely packed of college towns), so the sights, sounds and attendant nervous excitement of graduation are in the air.

I’ve been thinking about another graduation, though. A slightly smaller one, held in the echoing gym of a junior college on the plains of West Texas, filled with graduates in purple robes, shuffling feet squeaking against the varnished wood floor. At the back of the room, another group of teenagers huddled behind spindly music stands, looking a bit lost without their graduating friends and section leaders. They played “Pomp and Circumstance,” but the piece that made me well up, sitting in the front row wearing my gold Salutatorian stole embroidered with trailing green vines, was “Amazing Grace.”

Giving my speech

From where I sit now, a married woman with a grown-up office job and two literature degrees, it’s hard to believe that day was ten years ago.

My high school began releasing class rankings in the ninth grade, so for several years I knew I occupied the number-two spot in our class. The order of the top few places never shifted, though my friend Kate, in third place, constantly threatened to overtake me or even nab the valedictorian spot from our friend Cody. She never did, though, and in May of our senior year, Cody and I began thinking about – and procrastinating on – writing our speeches.

Several times during those last few weeks of school, we’d pass each other in the hallway, and one of us would ask, “Started your speech yet?” “Nope. You?” “Nope, not yet!” We’d grin nervously and part ways, both of us still wondering what on earth we were going to say.

When a student photographer called us out of class to snap our photo for the yearbook, we sat in the school courtyard for half an hour, talking about graduation and the upcoming summer and what would happen after. I knew, though I never said it aloud, that one reason I put off writing the speech was because it made graduation – and the wide, intimidating world beyond it – seem suddenly real.

A yearbook moment

My mom, as I kept procrastinating, kept slipping me sheets of yellow legal paper with lists of speech ideas. Nothing struck me, though, until she handed me a sheet covered with the lyrics to Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance.”

If you don’t know the song (which means you weren’t listening to country or pop radio in the early 2000s, because it was all over the place), it is a heartfelt, if sentimental, plea to embrace life, to resist the urge to play it safe by sitting in the shadows. As a shy bookworm who nevertheless had big plans and who did, in fact, love to dance, I thrilled to the song’s central line: “When you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.”

I didn’t sing it up on stage. I wasn’t brave enough for that, and anyway I don’t have Womack’s vocal range. But I did stand up there in my bright purple gown and read out a few of the lyrics. And I looked down at Cody in the front row, at my best friend Jon in the second row, at my fellow band nerds clustered in the back, instruments on their laps. I searched the rows of faces for my best friends, for Mike and Adam and Lina and Brittany, and I glanced over to the left at my family in the bleachers, my parents and sister and three grandparents. And I urged that auditorium full of people, many of whom I would never see again, to dance.

Celebrating – and relieved it’s over

Sometimes I still feel like that high school senior, awkward and hopeful and unsure – though she would be amazed at all the dancing, literal and figurative, I have done in the last ten years. She would hardly believe I joined a swing dance club or lived in Europe for a year or landed a gig writing book reviews for a national publication. But she would understand – she does understand – the courage it took to get to where I am, and the reasons I wear a silver disk around my neck inscribed with the word “brave.”

I wish I still had a copy of that speech somewhere, but I doubt the paper copies have survived my many moves, and the computer on which I typed it has long been consigned to the garbage. To this day, though, those lyrics still thrum occasionally through my heart and soul, and they remind me: Dance. Always dance.