Mary Louise Leipheimer's Opening Day speech, given at Convocation, August 28, 2008
Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible;
and suddenly you are doing the impossible. -- St. Francis of Assisi
Welcome to another beginning! New students, returning students, families, friends, faculty—we all gather here to celebrate this shared start to an academic year and to our residential community.
Today, Foxcroft opens for the 95th time. In 1914, the School opened with 24 boarders, five day students, and four faculty. The School gathered here now incorporates 188 students and 48 teaching faculty. The students come from 22 states and from 11 countries: Kyrgyzstan, South Korea, People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Mexico, Bahamas, France, Ireland, and Germany. Seventy-six percent or 143 are boarders; 45 are day students. Together, we in this community represent many different cultures, many different religions, many different experiences. Thank goodness, we are so different; for “if we were alike, one of us would be unnecessary.” Nonetheless, we share a common bond—the newness of this beginning. To this opening—whether a new ninth grader, a senior, a new faculty member fresh out of college, or a veteran professional—we bring our hopes, our dreams, our expectations, our talents, and our fears. The journey that begins now and ends in May will be full of challenges, subject to temporary detours, occasioned by storms, and tempered by joy. It will require the individual best from each of us: students ever responsible and hard working; teachers ever prepared and committed, and parents ever supportive and involved.
As we journey, each of us—faculty, students, and parents—will face unforeseen difficulties, opportunities, and/or challenges. As I thought about the unforeseen and how to prepare for it, I was reminded of a story from Robert Fulghum’s book, UH-OH. It begins:
"In the summer of 1959. At the Feather River Inn near the town of Blairsden in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California. A resort environment. And I, just out of college, have a job that combines being the night desk clerk in the lodge and helping out with the horse-wrangling at the stables. The owner/manager is Italian-Swiss, with European notions about conditions of employment. He and I do not get along. I think he’s a fascist who wants peasant employees who know their place, and he thinks I’m a good example of how democracy can be carried too far. I’m twenty-two and pretty free with my opinions, and he’s fifty-two and has a few opinions of his own.
"One week, the employees had been served the same thing for lunch every single day. Two hot dogs, a mound of
sauerkraut, and stale rolls. To compound insult with injury, the cost of meals was deducted from our check. I was
outraged.
"On Friday night of that awful week, I was at my desk job around 11:00 P.M., and the night auditor had just come on duty. I went into the kitchen to get a bite to eat and saw notes to the chef to the effect that hot dogs and
sauerkraut are on the employee menu for two more days.
"That tears it. I quit! For lack of any better audience. I unloaded on the night auditor, Sigmund Wollman. I declared that I have had it up to here; that I am going to get a plate of hot dogs and sauerkraut and go and wake up the owner and throw it on him. I am sick and tired of this and insulted and nobody is going to make me eat hot dogs and sauerkraut for a whole week and make me pay for it and who does he think he is anyhow and how can life be sustained on hot dogs and sauerkraut and this is un-American and I don’t like hot dogs and sauerkraut enough to eat it one day for heaven’s sake and the whole hotel stinks anyhow and the horses are all nags and the guests are all idiots and I’m packing my bags and heading for Montana where they never even heard of hot dogs and sauerkraut and wouldn’t feed that stuff to pigs. Something like that. I’m still mad about it.
"I raved on in this way for twenty minutes, and needn’t repeat it all here. You get the drift. My monologue was delivered at the top of my lungs, punctuated by blows on the front desk with a fly-swatter, the kicking of chairs, and some profanity. A call to arms, freedom, unions, uprisings, and the breaking of chains for the working masses.
"As I pitched my fit, Sigmund Wollman, the night auditor, sat quietly on his stool, watching me with sorrowful eyes. Put a bloodhound in a suit and tie and you have Sigmund Wollman. He’s got good reason to look sorrowful. Survivor of Auschwitz. Three years. Thin, coughed a lot. He liked being alone at the night job—gave him intellectual space, gave him peace and quiet, and, even more, he could go into the kitchen and have a snack whenever he wanted to—all the hot dogs and sauerkraut he wanted. To him, a feast. More than that, there’s nobody around at night to tell him what to do. In Auschwitz he dreamed of such a time. The only person he sees at work is me, the nightly disturber of his dream. Our shifts overlap for an hour. And here I am again. A one-man war party at full cry.
“Fulchum, are you finished?”
“No. Why?”
“Lissen, Fulchum. Lissen, me, lissen me. You know what’s wrong with you? It’s not hot dogs and craut and it’s not the boss and it’s not the chef and it’s not this job.”
“So what’s wrong with me?”
“Fulchum, you think you know everything, but you don’t know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire—then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is Lumpy.
“Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And will not annoy people like me so much. Good night.”
"In a gesture combining dismissal and blessing, he waved me off to bed. Seldom in my life have I been hit between the eyes with truth so hard. Years later I heard a Japanese Zen Buddhist priest describe what the moment of enlightenment was like and I knew exactly what he meant. There in that late-night darkness of the Feather River Inn, Sigmund Wollman simultaneously kicked me and opened a window in my mind.
"For thirty years now, in times of stress and strain, when something has me backed against the wall and I’m ready to do something really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful face appears in my mind and asks: “Fulchum. Problem or inconvenience?”
"I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a
lump in a breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference."
At Foxcroft, we will learn to know the difference!
• two tests and a quiz on the same day?—an inconvenience
• a rain-soaked garden for graduation or a rainy opening day—an inconvenience
• a double-booked calendar—an inconvenience
• too many faculty meetings—an inconvenience
• the fiber optics are cut in the soon-to-begin construction of athletic/student center—we are unwired for 36 hours—an inconvenience
• not studying; not trying; not doing our own work—a problem
• meanness of spirit—an unacceptable problem
As we begin, we are confronted by insurmountable opportunities (ala Pogo), and I can guarantee inconveniences; together, we will juggle the problems, and in May, we will celebrate our wisdom at knowing that it’s about an attitude; it’s about being Tigger, not Eeyore; it’s all in a word!
