Anna Holt's Speech

Anna Holt

My Brown Bag

 

What is time? Some moments slip by, lost in a sea of emotion or ignorance, while others stretch on for miles, for ages. Perhaps a clock is nothing more a weak human attempt to measure our lives, to count our days and limit our years. How do we hope to represent our existence in numbers and is it possible that our obsession with time is merely a distraction from the present?

Mr. Geise, Ms. Kozel, Mom, Dad, Darcey, Pine Point School, and the class of 2009. I stand before you today with 15 years, 33 days, 8 hours, and 29 minutes to look back on, however I am here to speak about what lies beneath such a calculation. Who was I then, who will I become, and perhaps most importantly, who I am right now?

 

            A historian might tell you that the past is written into the pages of textbooks, measured in dates, and memorized by anyone willing to learn. However you cannot capture the sound of a laugh, the heart of family, or the feeling of love on paper. For me, these things lie in a tattered piece of fabric. My blanket is the very essence of my childhood; my textbook, my dates of importance, my representation of the 15 glorious years that are now behind me.

My blanket was once a dress. Then it was a tablecloth, and then a hat. Soon it served as a dog, and at one point it was a tent. But regardless of what it appeared to be, my blanket is a home base. It serves as a forgiving safety net should I ever fall, a bundle of memories to return to when I question myself. It represents everything that I once was. It represents home.  This being said, the past is something to treasure. It carries our memories, from the happiest times we can recall to our harshest recollections of regret. Whether it is in a picture or a textbook or an old piece of cloth, remember that where you have been is the place that made you strong enough to see that no matter what, the sun will rise again.

 

Today, it is strange for me to look around and see that this school is no longer my future. In a matter of months, the memories I have created here will weave their way into the blanket that represents what once was. Pine Point School will be my past.

Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Brown. To me, this story holds no complex themes or abstract concepts or deeper meaning. It is a simple thank you, a pure goodnight, and as I prepare myself to leave in June, that is what I want to give. Goodnight to “two little kittens and a pair of mittens, and a little toy-house and a young mouse.” Goodnight to polo shirts and bake sales, and long  afternoons on a bumpy lacrosse field. Goodbye to dance class and book fairs, and slumber parties with morning field trips back to school. Goodnight to endless Pine Cobble sportsmanship awards. Goodbye to everything I know, and goodnight to the 21 people who will stay with me forever. This ending that I will soon experience is a crossroads. It is the end of Mr. Mitchell’s freezing cold classroom and hot chocolate in English every day, however it is the beginning of a new chapter, a bright yet ambiguous future. Isn’t it interesting that the one thing that is entirely unknown also happens to be the one thing that we are cetrain will come? I know what is now behind me, and while I’m unsure of what it will hold, I know that the canvas of my future is waiting. Tomorrow is a beautiful mystery, but perhaps in order to say hello, we must say first learn to say goodbye.

 

Aside from clocks and calendars, time is a funny thing. There is the past, pulling at our heels, and the future, waiting impatiently to be discovered. However in the middle of these two things lies the feeling of sun on your skin, the taste of ice cream, the smell of autumn. Wedged fleetingly in between past and future is the warmth of a hug, the shimmer of a smile. It is the second that you look at your best friend and burst into laughter. It is the instant when no words are required. It is a perfect and undefined moment. It is the present. There is nothing that I can pull from my brown bag to represent this, nothing to convey something so magnificently simple.

To the younger members of the audience, I ask that if Anna Holt is ever to cross your mind, you will forget about a blanket and a brown bag and a book. I ask that you remember me smiling, laughing, seeing, breathing, being, for the present is more than a brown bag. It’s worth more than a clock ticking away our time. It’s more than the dates we live by and the appointments we keep.

Maybe the past and future seem to be enough for now. Maybe today it’s ok to look ahead and glance behind, however as I wake up every morning to the sun shining through the windows, I see that the present is the only thing to fulfill a moment, to make use of today, to complete a life.