My dear cousin Cindy had a very powerful reaction to her daughter’s graduation from Union College that she was kind enough to share with us on her Facebook page and this bit in particular really struck a resonant chord with me (no pun intended):
Courtney graduates this Saturday with a bachelor’s degree in music education. All of us thought that she would get this degree and come back to Southern Illinois to teach. But God had other plans for her. This is why I feel compelled to share this because I always told my kids that it matters where you attend college. As a parent, we need to help our kids find the will of God for their lives, where He leads them to college, and the careers they choose.
Miss Courtney gave some more detail in her own post but essentially she was originally planning on following her mother’s (and quite a few McClerrens) into the front of the classroom but discovered that she had quite another calling called “musicology” that would take her toward Oxford MS in the next step of her academic journey as she pursues a Master’s degree at Ole Miss.
So I can certainly understand why Cindy might be a bit surprised (as indeed we all were) that Miss Courtney’s fate seems to lie in a different direction than was originally imagined though I have no doubt that even if Miss Courtney does not choose to be a teacher as a profession, I’m absolutely certain she’ll still pass along whatever lessons are needed because teaching is very much a McClerren tradition as much if not more so than the near universal passion amongst us for music (and varying degrees of talent of actually playing an instrument or singing where the audience decides to stick around until the end of the performance!). 🙂
It got me thinking (and we know how dangerous that can be!) whilst I was on my way with Alex down to Buies Creek to retrieve my absolute favourite “nobody from nowhere” and Camel of the very best kind as she was moving out of the dorms for the summer.
I remember Katie’s passion and ambitions when she began her journey at Campbell University and they’ve seemed to change a bit over time and I’m not totally sure even she knows what she will end up doing when she’s walking across that stage much sooner than I’d really thought would happen.
When you’re talking about what you’re likely to do for a career for potentially the rest of your life, it’s right and proper to ask the questions and if need be make a bit of a course correction if not go completely in a different direction if that’s where your passion and the calling of your heart may well take you.
After all, if you’d asked me before I went off to university…I was absolutely dead set that I was going to fly Boeing 727s for Delta Airlines.
Dead. Set.
I ended up graduating with a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science with a minor in history (to counteract the beating my GPA took in the hardest undergraduate programming degree in this country by far).
It wasn’t a total change of direction as I’d always enjoyed computers and programming and especially databases and it ended up being a wonderful career once I’d realised I’d missed out on the FAA Class III medical waiver due to an incorrect assumption about the required eyesight (I was thinking it was the military 20/20 standard I was used to that was required for commercial) and didn’t find out about the error until I was too old at the young age of 22 and would never have made captain.
Now I’m doing accounting and tax preparation in a corporation I own and acting as a Chief Financial Officer for another…and a couple of nights a week I’m spinning tunes for a beer league (who’d have imagined *THAT*?) when I’m not being the monkey with an itchy trigger finger on the camera’s shutter release.
If you’d said that rather shy and very introverted eighteen year-old kid who had just unpacked his stuff in a dorm room on the second floor of Osceola Hall that I’d be doing the things I’ve done (particularly the last ten years!), I’d have laughed and thought you quite mad.
A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
Willy Wonka – “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” (1971)
Indeed! 🙂
What would have been much less obvious to the observer of that eighteen year-old wondering what the coming year was going to bring was the absolute certainty that come what may, the one thing that was not going to happen under any circumstances was that I was going to return back to live in Port Orange.
That sounds much worse than it actually was.
Dad and I certainly had our moments through the years where we would disagree on a point or another and sometimes rather vehemently so until the lesson on the concept of chain of command needed to be reinforced with an understanding that the relationship in that house was not primus inter pares but rather a retired Army officer parent that was definitely primus. 😉
But the number of the day that governed his waking days for about as long as I can remember was 18.
About this time of year, that number would be brought front and centre with his favourite lecture about what I can expect once I reached my 18th birthday.
Being a bit of poet and artist at heart, he found a rather unique way to explain the concept of his eventual and definitely happily anticipated date of his parole from the day-to-day managing the lower-ranked resident of our little nest.
He would tell the story of Mama Eagle and describe in great detail how she would care so much for her eggs and eventually should they hatch, the little eaglets. She would move heaven and earth to make sure those precious little eaglets were well-fed and protected whilst they were in the nest.
Now, it helps to understand where eagles usually prefer to build their nests to understand the really important part of his story.
Take a look at where Shadow and Jackie call home…notice it’s pretty high up in the air in a tree overlooking Big Bear Lake?
If memory serves, it’s about 150 feet up in a mountain pine tree and that’s actually relatively low altitude by eagle standards…they’ve been known to build their nests on crevices in the mountains well above the rocks below just waiting to claim whatever unfortunate creature may fall upon it.
Shadow and especially Jackie are fiercely protective of that nest and their rather large territory surrounding it and all that find shelter within.
Her latest clutch of eaglets (Sandy and Luna) are growing exponentially by the day…they were inside their eggs until Easter weekend and now they’re getting much larger and their feathers are coming in and fledging can’t be that far off.
And as long as they’re in that nest, food and protection are going to be provided whilst Sandy and Luna are learning what it takes to be the apex predator in that valley that soars upon the very strong winds of the area.
But here’s the critical part of his story…Jackie is such a devoted mother eagle and will train her eaglets well but there will come a point in time where a switch flips in her eagle brain and she’ll use her mighty wings to flip those little eaglets out of the nest if they’ve not already gotten on with the business of learning to fly themselves in the time frame she has in mind.
That’s the point where that little eaglet has a very stark choice: stretch those wings and fly to meet their destiny in the way eagles were intended or meet a much more unpleasant fate on the ground far below that nest.
The one choice those little eaglets won’t have is returning to live in that nest once Jackie is of the mind that they’re ready to go find their own territory to rule with eye, wing, and talon as an eagle ought to do.
The first time I remember him telling me that story and then pointing out that once I reach the age of 18 that he’s going all Mama Eagle on me and using his mighty wings to send me on to my destiny in my own nest somewhere else was when I was about five years old.
And yes, that’s a darned harrowing prospect to consider at that age and each of the intervening years until 1988 rolled along and I hit that magic number.
I’ll confess that I was more than a little concerned at just how literal my father could be at times and wondering if he was truly going to chuck me out the door with hearty congratulations and bag in hand and best wishes on finding my own nest about a month to go before my actual graduation.
As it turned out, he was magnanimous enough to give me a stay of execution of the eviction from the Port Orange nest until I moved into the dorm that August. Not that it made much of a difference anyway because I spent that summer racking up 100+ hour weeks working at the steakhouse (including a personal high of 130 hours in one week!) so that I was rarely if ever at the house until it was time for me to pack up and shove off.
The point of him continuing to tell that story time and time again was that there was no ambiguity when it came to the expectations…you turn 18, you’re out of here. When you get a place of your own, you’ll have your dog Buster there to keep you company.
But what you’re *NOT* going to do is bounce right back to this house to live as you’ve done these previous 18 years.
Over the years at UCF, I’d see more than a few of my fellow students do that and not think a second thought of it. Some of them were even of a mind that their parents had absolutely no say in whether they came back into the nest or not which I remember finding an utterly shocking and foreign concept to me.
I would have *NEVER* dared to try to pull that stunt with Dad when he’d made his expectations crystal clear and in no uncertain terms through the years.
I had shared that story with a couple of my friends and they were astonished and felt that it was very harsh and unfair.
I never saw it that way and still don’t. He’d made his expectations clear from the off and he never wavered and I always knew where I stood with him.
Deep down (even though he’d *NEVER* willingly admit to it until we were on our way to my grandmother’s funeral in Marion IL), he was a little heartbroken that the iron-clad rule that he’d laid down for my 18th year had actually come to pass…that I was actually all the way gone and that I never came back into the nest to live.
When my diploma from UCF was with me in North Carolina less than 24 hours after I’d walked across the stage with my household goods halfway through South Carolina, I think it became patently obvious that my destiny did not include returning to that bedroom on Chelsea Way other than on a brief visit.
I would remind you that his other favourite observation if not rule about visitors in that house were to think of them like fish…after a couple of days, they really start to stink and need to move on down the road. But that’s a tale for another day… 😉
But it was clear that no matter how much he might have actually missed having me round the place, he was infinitely more proud that he’d done what he felt was right to ensure his one and only eaglet didn’t try to come back into the nest and ultimately never needed to.
It may not have been the destiny he expected but I know that he eventually came to understand why the calling of my heart was always to the state where I was born and where I truly belong.
On that trip to Marion which had a lot of soul-searching and apologies and more than a little tears from the both of us on the outbound leg of the journey for all sorts of painful memories and regrets, I did ask him if it were the case that I’d totally flamed out at UCF and needed a place to stay until I could figure out my next move…was it true (as I’d suspected all along!) that he’d have let me come back home with the expectation that job and/or new college would happen forthwith?
His answer was a quiet whisper and simplicity itself which took my breath away.
Yes.
One word that meant the world to me in that moment as I’d always suspected that was the case but I felt my place was to honour his wish to the best of my ability no matter what.
At the end of the day, that’s what I truly believe that he was wanting to happen all along and I’d never understood General Patton’s wisdom on that subject more than at this moment.
Accept the challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory.
General George S Patton
Dad’s story of Mama Eagle may not have been the easiest one to hear and accept but he had rightly judged that it was the one I needed to hear whether it heralded scary times ahead or not.
These were my thoughts as I’m driving to Katie to help pack out her stuff that was perhaps coloured a bit by the continuing coverage of Jackie and Shadow’s eaglets and how they’re growing exponentially before our eyes.
That’s why my response to Cindy was this variation on Mama Eagle’s story that I would have loved to have heard through the years took the form that it did.
Truth be told, I’m thinking this is one of my better efforts at the art of writing… 🙂
We may never know where the winds may take an eagle when the winds touch the eagle’s wings but I try to have faith that the journey is right and good.
It isn’t easy at times.
We remember the times they were eaglets in the nest and those hesitant steps into a harsh world as they would fledge and before you know it those wings are spread and they take a leap off the nest to an future that is never guaranteed.
But if you’ve ever had the privilege to see an eagle fly high above the trees and the mountains to meet their destiny with open eyes as only an eagle can, it’s hard not being moved by such a beautiful and majestic sight.
The true test is understanding and believing with the core of your being that they will never forget who they are, where they come from, what they were taught and when the time is right…the way back home.
All the best to Ryan and Miss Courtney as they spread their wings and fly to a destiny that is certain to be grand, inspiring, and fulfilling!
