Good morning!

Thirty-four years ago I was standing under a tent on Westlands Lawn on a rainy day in late May, wearing a great dress that I had bought in Exeter, England, the year before, during my Junior Year Abroad I remember it vividly: a white, gauzy Indian cotton, with a long flowing skirt; the top a tight bodice with multi-colored, jewel-tone embroidery in vertical stripes down a shirred front. My hair - like almost everyone else's that day, including the maybe 30 guys who graduated with me in 1973 - was really long and parted in the middle; we all looked like some strange, cloned versions of Cher!

I remember my friends standing nearby, and feeling the pang of nostalgia already, knowing that our time together - as housemates in Brebner; as members of an extraordinary movement and teaching seminar led by the incomparable Katya Delakova; as intellectual explorers, discovering the previously unknown territory of Dante's Inferno with Wolf Spitzer as our Virgil on that journey; or recognizing ourselves in the exuberant Kwakiutl with our very own shaman, the quietly masterful Irving Goldman - knowing that this time was about to end; that we would never again know each other, or be with one another, in quite the same way.

I remember my parents sitting several rows behind me, and feeling my father's loving gaze at my back, knowing he was bursting with pride and no small degree of relief, having paid his very last Sarah Lawrence tuition bill!

What I don't remember is who spoke that morning, or what that person said. It's a complete blank

which, under the circumstances, I find rather humbling

Okay, so fast forward now. It's May 2006, just a year ago. I'm sitting in a huge room, in front of a huge television screen, listening to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. It's commencement at NYU. My son, Nathaniel, is graduating from Tisch, with a degree in photography and imaging. His father and grandmother have secured the two authorized family seats near the fountain in Washington Square Park, and my daughter, Nat's girlfriend, and I have made our way with thousands - make that tens of thousands - of other families of graduates, to watch the processionals and hear the speeches in various remote locations. I listen to Justice Kennedy's words, and I am moved as much by what he says, as how he says it. This gentle, thoughtful, supremely intelligent man (excuse the pun!) is literally seething with anger as he speaks - something, perhaps, Nat's dad and grandmother cannot even notice without the benefit of the large screen TV.

Justice Kennedy is offering, as is expected, an exhortation to the graduates; but, he is also offering, quite astonishingly, an apology. He reminds the graduates of their imperative to advance freedom in the world; but he goes on to demand that they pursue an understanding of freedom that is not estranged from the equally essential commitment to compassion. He urges these young adults, with pronouncements that sound sibylline in their authority, to embark upon the world's stage with a recogniton of the ineluctable humanity of those we consider