speech, speech
We sit down, expanded family stretched out in the middle of a row up at the top of the lecture hall where they’re hosting graduation for Josh’s and Riley’s college program, and my mama mind thinks, it’s a lovely view from up here, really, perched as we are like birds on a line, watching from the top of the world.
I look down on the table draped with the college crest on a banner of silky gold, stacked with piles of certificates waiting to be conferred, and the extra chairs in neat plastic rows up on the stage, for important guests, and I lay a hand flat against my chest, sitting back in my chair, moved over this occasion of celebration for Josh and Riley and their classmates, for these other families settling in all around us.
At the same time, I feel a sudden flash of warning that Riley might need me, and I imagine myself sprinting down those stairs at the side of the room to get to her, wondering how fast I could go, knowing that if she did need me, no one would believe how fast, not even me. I would kick off my heels—no need, when sprinting, for those—and just go. It wouldn’t be just me going though, but the whole long line of us—Kevin and Camille and Ray, Janae and Adam and Zoe, and Josh. Well, Josh would get to her first. Not that I’m having some premonition that Riley will fall or seize or freeze, only that a mama’s mind, once familiar with the realities of life’s unexpected waves, goes ahead of the possibilities. Before the horrible happens, if it suddenly should, I am already there in my thoughts, already kneeling beside her, already cradling her beautiful head in my lap.
Riley does look beautiful wearing that black hat and gown down there, her hair shining in golden ringlets our stylist put in at the salon, her eyelashes mascara-long and black, her lips a brilliant petal pink. She looks every bit her of her years, but even more, her love, her joy, her peace, and with this view, I see not just the Riley of tonight but also Riley with those tight flaxen curls at age three, when she would tuck her face into her daddy’s neck at the beach, holding a sand scooper like a giant plastic-blue hand over the one naked ear to block the sound of crashing waves. I see Riley with those gilded curls, those little white-pressed hands, at eight, her mouth stretched wide into a scream, her head touched with sunlight, when on a walk in the woods she heard a bee coming minutes before the rest of us could detect the sound. I see those now happy cheeks, that clear, heart-shaped face, in other times tear-stained and blotched strawberry-red by too loud, too different, too many, too much too much too much, those elegant ringed hands, small again, rattling doorknobs in the thin hours of the morning when she felt too frustrated to sleep.
I hear, in Riley’s voice, now bell-clear and articulate, speaking out into the auditorium, acknowledging the room, falling on ears and traveling over heads as she talks about her program and all that she’s gained participating, also that baby voice before she had any words at all, when she’d jab a finger toward something she wanted and grunt for emphasis— unh, unh, unh, then eventually, more, more, more, and want, want, I want. I hear her little girl voice pleading, it’s just hard for me, her middle-school voice, bemoaning the rush and echo of students, feet, voices, in the stairwell after school, her young adult voice, carefully explaining that she can’t really name favorite people, favorite patients, favorite nurses, because she loves them all.
We contain multitudes, as the poet said; that’s what I’m saying too, and maybe better than anyone, the people who give us life, who raise us and shepherd us along, see them all together, not just who we’re becoming but the people we were before. If that’s true of human parents, with all our flaws and finitude, I take comfort in how much truer this must be of God, the better parent, who watches over me not just now, delighting in me in this moment, but in all times at one time, seeing and loving every version of me that’s ever been.
If I, with my broken-up love, can be thinking and feeling all these things for Riley as she graduates—how much I love her and look how far she’s traveled and how soon could I jump over all these people just to be beside her—well, let’s just say as I untangle the knot of all that it gets easier to understand, not that I ever could completely, the God who loves me, at once visionary and attentive and just and commanding and protective and oh-so-affectionate, to imagine that He is always listening and aware and going ahead, planning for blessings and orchestrating rescues and authoring freedoms, as well as remembering where we’ve been together, loving at once everyone I was and am and will be. I’m just saying that it strikes me now that He’s my always, while I’m sitting here swelling over the woman my daughter has become, while I’m loving and remembering and envisioning her, and I recognize that God’s relationship with me might just be infinitely more complicated than my relationship with Him. He remembers me, after all, in the forming.
The people listening to Riley’s speech, watching her stand poised up there at the microphone, react with surprise and applause when she mentions her work at the hospital, and she glances up, surprised by their surprise, because she is only just the person she is right now, always still trying so hard, and that’s no surprise to her at all.
She fairly sparkles, that’s what I’m thinking, and oh, how He loves us, and how beautiful the feet that bring good news.
Why that verse? I wonder, feeling curious, but then I know, because as she stood and walked up there to speak tonight, I immediately recognized this—the bringing of good news–as part of Riley’s calling, as another part of her beauty. I’m not referring to the speech she’s giving, particularly, but more the way that her life lived in love keeps saying that very good, truest thing—you are loved, loved, always loved–to everyone she meets. That has, in fact, always been Riley’s best speech. It is the echo of the touch of God, born all the way back in the womb-deep moments when He made her.
Right this minute, she’s up there reading some thoughts we smoothed out together across the kitchen while I chopped and stirred and simmered and she sat in her pajamas at the bar, tapping the computer keys, rainbow pens spread in an arc above the planner beside her, an umm okay, let me think, sitting in the air between us, but the other, that you are loved, you-are-loved, is actually the speech her life keeps on giving continually, and that, plain and simple as a heartbeat, is the real good news she brings, walking, held steady by God’s own hands, on her own two lovely feet.
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, this not the beauty of adornment, but instead, the word blooming from a primitive root that means only to be at home, the beauty of natural inclination, of a soul that without affectation simply carries the goodness of God. The day Riley and I brainstormed her graduation speech, me thinking how absolutely, joyfully, God-typically ironic that she who once had no words at all would be asked to do such a thing, I realized, looking up, seeing years of my Rileys in the one, sleep-rumpled, truly beautiful young woman in front of me, that she’d been speaking naturally all her years only the goodness of God, even all the years she lived apart from sentences, and that this now is the speech she and Josh still live to give together, that above all, you are loved.
