I have delivered a few graduation speeches over the years. Those experiences have led to this recurring dream, a version of which many will recognize.
It is the day of graduation. For various reasons, I have not yet written the speech. If that were not bad enough, I have forgotten the time and place of the ceremony. And I have no way to get there!
Not long ago, in real life, I sent a message to St. Petersburg College, the school attended by my wife and three daughters. I recommended a writer I know as a potential commencement speaker. A polite response informed me that such a speech by a special speaker is no longer part of the ritual. It takes too much time. The main purpose is to hustle hundreds of cheerful graduates across the stage and out the door.
Maybe that is what triggered my recent dream, where I was to be the SPC speaker. With only minutes to spare, I had still not yet written my speech. Normally, this would have filled me with anxiety.
But not this time. This time, I improvised a speech on the spot and was ready to offer it up to an adoring audience. Before I had a chance to deliver it, I woke up.
No worries. I committed my wise remarks to memory and offer it here, in its glorious brevity, in honor of all those new grads at SPC — and to graduating students everywhere.
Dear Graduates,
I want to begin with a poem. Here it is:
A wonderful bird is the pelican.
Its bill will hold more than its belican.
That couplet was written not by William Shakespeare or Robert Frost. It was written more than 100 years ago by a newspaper writer in Tennessee who really liked birds.
Those two lines became so popular that they appeared for years on Florida postcards next to the image of those graceful winged creatures, the ones that, at first look, appear prehistoric.
I was reading the newspaper one day — a habit I recommend — when I noticed that the City of St. Petersburg had commissioned a sculpture to stand at the entrance of the new Pier District. The artwork was a large red origami-style pelican. I realized anew how important that bird was to the history and iconography of our city.
I was inspired to go to City Hall with a proposal: The brown pelican, once endangered, should become the official bird of the City of St. Petersburg. This designation would help good folks spread the word about the dangers humans pose to all seabirds. Those dangers are often posed by people who fish.
Pelicans can mistake lures for real fish and get hooked. People fishing make the mistake of cutting the line. The result can be a slow death for the birds, along with fishing lines being dragged back to nesting places.
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Explore all your optionsOne morning my wife and I were at St. Pete Beach and walked down to the spot where the Gulf of Mexico flows into Blind Pass. Pelicans were dive-bombing the water, hungry for fish, and, sure enough, one bird snagged the lure of a young man fishing off the sea wall.
I worried that the man, maybe as young as one of you, would cut the line, leaving the pelican to its doom. Instead, he gently pulled the bird closer to the shore. He climbed down some rocks to get closer to the water. He grabbed a tool from his tackle box. He controlled the movement of the bird, opened its satchel of a bill, pushed the hook through, cut it with his pliers and freed the bird from the fishing line.
When he climbed back up, I could see that his hand was bloody. I patted him on the back and offered my appreciation that he had done exactly the right thing.
Not long after that event, the City Council declared that the brown pelican was now the official bird of the city. They invited me to the meeting, where I recited the entire poem, not just the couplet:
A wonderful bird is the pelican
Its bill will hold more than its belican
It can keep in its beak
Food enough for a week
But I’m damned if I see how the helican.
There are lessons to be learned from my brief words, dear graduates.
You can learn that a poem, even a brief one, even a silly one, can be powerful.
You can learn that an ordinary person with a cool idea can move City Hall.
But the key lesson is not from the poet or politician.
It comes from that young man — who might be one of you — who saved that single pelican.
He had a craft to which he was devoted: fishing. He had the tools necessary to carry out that craft. He had the physical courage to climb down those rocks and get his hands bloody. Most important, he had the moral courage to understand that there is a difference between the easy way, and the right way.
Be like that young man, graduates.
One more thing before you toss your caps in the air and spray the champagne. When I fell back to sleep, my dream continued. In it, I imagined I was at a tattoo parlor where an artist named Tate was inking a large image of a pelican in flight across my back, shoulder to shoulder. I will not reveal now whether or not I have acted upon that vision. You may have to invite me back next year to find out.
Now go out there and save a bird. And the world.
Roy Peter Clark is a contributing writer to the Tampa Bay Times. Contact him at rclark@poynter.org.
