Unlike Chipping the Slab

I had an interesting, invitation from the university at which I teach to deliver the commencement address to the graduating class there on the Shanghai campus.  Wow.  I thought of Steve Jobs and Barack Obama and all the commencement addresses I’d sat through over the years.  I remember listening to the senior diplomat Richard Holbrooke deliver a speech to my grad school that was no different from the one he’d delivered at another Boston university a year earlier, which my classmate has shared me the text of, before the big day.  So it was anti-climactic, to hear him reach the same crescendo and hear the same plea to consider the importance of public service, when I knew it was coming.  I also didn’t hold it against him as one imagines that any one person only has so many commencement speeches latent within them. 

Did I have one?  For better or worse I was confident that there was one in there somewhere.  But this message had yet to emerge from the marble.  Indeed, I had yet to pick up the chisel.  I walked around the large, alabaster slab, for much of the week.  I decided to get little things cleared out of the way and today I did my best to dispense with one and then another to-do, so I would have an uncluttered lane in which to accelerate. 

I’m in the small, modest Air China lounge now, down by Gate C-05.  These are the gates that Air China send people to when they are flying on the popular flights south to Shanghai or Hangzhou.  I’ve got a few peanuts and some middling Dynasty white that I helped myself to from the bottom of the refrigerator, trying to draft something.  The phone rings.  It’s a colleague.  I can’t help but take the call.  Discussing problems with selling things is routinized and easy, unlike chipping the slab.    

Last call has already been made.   The gate isn’t far and I try to ignore the winnowing population here in the lounge.  The young gals are starting to clean up in earnest.  The attendant behind the counter notifies me once again, that the plane has made its final call., sir.  To the plane then.  I’ll write on the plane.  And in the cab to the hotel.  Something will come to me on the plane.

Thursday 8/23/18