Enabling Dreams

Remarks from the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts Scholarship Recognition Event, August 13, 2001

What an exciting evening! Thank you for allowing me to be a part of it. And thank you to the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts for administering the many endowment funds that provide over $30 million in principle designated for scholarships and loans. The Education Office of the Foundation really provides a service to the community by coordinating the scholarships and loans made possible by the interest on the endowment.

When I thought about my remarks to you tonight, I knew I wanted to talk about dreams–and the importance of having the courage to dream. The fact that you have applied for one of these awards is proof that you have dreams and the desire to pursue them. However, maintaining the courage to continue to pursue one’s dream can be sometimes difficult. Please allow me to share with you something my father said to me many years ago...words which echo still and are there to sustain me whenever my courage falters. I was an adult when he said what he said, but the story begins for me as a toddler.

When I was a child, I was fortunate enough to have my great-grandmother living with us. Daily I crawled up onto her ample lap to have her read to me. She spent lots of time reading to me and to my brothers long before we started school. Those were special moments...moments in which books played a significant role. Books were to be handled reverently and were regarded as a gateway to knowledge. I recall even now a series called the How and Why Library of Knowledge. If I could find those volumes now, I'm sure I would find much of the information dated, inaccurate, misleading, and incomplete. But then, in my great-grandmother's nurturing lap, that series of books was part of the enchantment, exploration, and veneration for learning.

That is why I was so confused when once, as a toddler, I saw my father tearing the pages out of a large, leather-bound book. How could he be doing that? Why was he doing it? I couldn't have been more puzzled--confused. That image remains as intense now as it seemed then. Though I have no recollection of asking why or of learning the reason then, I must have asked someone; or perhaps I expected to learn the reason somewhere in the pages of the How and Why Library of Knowledge series.

Some years later I learned his reason for defacing those books. He worked the midnight shift in the Ford Motor Company River Rouge Plant factory and went to law school by day. He and my mother had married while still in college and had an ever growing family to support through the completion of university and three years in law school (I am the oldest of six). In order to study at work, he needed to conceal "the book" to the extent he could. So, he tore the pages out of his books--"very carefully," he said--and placed them as carefully between the soft cotton of double undershirts worn to protect the torn pages. With torn out pages, he could manage more surreptitiously to read a page at a time. It could not have been easy--not to mention safe--studying the rules of evidence and contract and constitutional law while putting in a full effort on an assembly line. But, he told me later, a law degree had been his dream. "You have to have a dream, honey." were his exact words to me.

The image remains vivid because the example has likely been a more powerfully guiding principle in my life than I had ever realized.

In the poem, a Dream Deferred, Langston Hughes posed the following provocative questions:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, or
Fester like a sore, and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat, or
Crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Over sixty years later in On the Pulse of Morning (written and delivered by the author at its first Clinton inauguration), Maya Angelou played and varied the theme of dream. I will not read the entire poem but from the section that begins:

You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot, the Italian, the Hungarian, the Pole,
You, the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru bought, sold, stolen,
Arriving on a nightmare, praying for a dream.
Here root yourselves beside me.
I am that tree planted by the river;
I, the rock.
I, the river.
I, the tree.
I am yours - your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces;
You have a piercing need for this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but
If faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again to the dream.

(Each time I read these words, I am moved yet again by their power--their imperative.)

And, over the years, in my journal I have often written the line from Yeats: "In dreams begins responsibility."

My great-grandmother? She died when I was in the third grade. And my father died almost 20 years ago. I like to think that they both live on in the books I have read and the stories I have told to our son. Among my most treasured possessions are the sweat-stained pages of the Rules of Evidence. Whenever I feel myself lacking the courage to risk, to learn, to dream, I touch those pages and reconnect with the power of human purpose, conviction, and a passion for living.

Now, to all you award winners I say Congratulations! To your families and friends and all of us in this greater community of western Massachusetts I say we must pledge to continue to encourage and to inspire you to enable your dreams.

My father was right, of course. We must have dreams...and we must have the courage to do what is necessary to pursue them...to enable them. The song, "Happy Talk" from the musical South Pacific has a wonderful refrain that goes: "... you gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true."

I salute you for having the dream of enabling your education by pursuing these awards. We understand our responsibility is to help you have the courage to make it come true.. Congratulations!

Now, I look forward to hearing who you are......

Thank you