Wesleyan University Class of 2016

This past Wednesday was Arrival Day for freshmen and transfer students at Wesleyan University.  Our daughter Nicole, who is on the Wesleyan Field Hockey team was already in her dorm a couple of days prior, and was wearing the white and red tee-shirt that designates her a Wesleyan athlete, and as such gives her the added honor of helping new arrivals get moved in by virtue of her having arrived early.  This made the trip for my wife and I a serene and uplifting experience enhanced by the fact that we were also blessed with one of the top ten weather days of the year – a sunny day in the 70s with beautiful scattered clouds and a light breeze.

As we moved from session to session, all led by brilliant, thoughtful and progressive people who clearly had the very best interests of our children at heart, an indescribable feeling of well-being and satisfaction, coupled with a swelling sense of hope and joy pervaded our beings.  Throughout our beautiful daughter’s young life, we had attempted to instill in her a sense of fairness, of justice even, and faith that if one works hard, is honest, has integrity in all things and above all – is NICE – she would be rewarded.  Not with entitlements of privilege, but with the earned sense of a job well done, a life well-lived, and if she was very fortunate, the earned respect of peers and mentors alike.  I am so happy to report that Nicole has reaped all of these rewards, and am even prouder to report that she richly deserves them.

The day’s activities culminated in the stirring remarks of Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University.  With a style reminiscent of Woody Allen, Garrison Keillor and, well, my Dad all rolled into one,  he enriched us with the sense that Wesleyan was a home, a family, and a stimulating and challenging intellectual environment that was to be, above all, whatever Nicole and her 749 classmates chose to make it.

Then, as we drove off towards home, Lisa checked her messages.

Turns out the youth field hockey group where we live are up to their old tricks.  Having seceded (and that’s an EXTREMELY kind way of putting it) from the legitimate field hockey oversight organization which my wife runs,  they continue to snipe at her and her board members in an effort to undermine their unity and credibility.  While the thoroughly disgusting antics of the youth field hockey group are beyond the scope of this post, when juxtaposed against the idyllic backdrop of Wesleyan and its ideals, the perspective makes their behavior all the more baffling – in fact, pathetically comical.

So here it is:

True integrity is something nobody can ever take away from you.  It frees you to pursue knowledge, understanding, enlightenment and even grace.

If you’re a liar, you may fool a lot of people.  At the end and beginning of every single day of your life though, you’re a liar.  Even if you’re the only one who knows it!  Any attainment, accomplishment or recognition you achieve is perpetually and irrevocably tainted.