Greetings to the families, guests, faculty, administration, Board of Education, and especially the Class of 2020, whenever and wherever you see this.

I cannot make this speech without acknowledging the extraordinary circumstances in which we are currently graduating. Obviously, none of us ever imagined that our last day in school would be that dreary, uncertain, mid-March day, instead of the usual triumphant, sunny day in June. At the very least we have this celebration, but we cannot define our high school based on the last third of our senior year. I think that it is imperative to look fondly on the rest of our time, not just through this darkened lens of lockdown, but despite it. Each of us individually certainly missed at least one significant moment that we would have remembered for years, but that does not mean that we have none of these meaningful moments. I do not want to deliver an elegy for the last third of our senior year; instead, I want to take a moment to remind ourselves of what the past four years have meant to us.

I remember Sr. Vazquez gave my Spanish class some advice that I think is important at this time. He said that there is a world inside of you, which is the core of your identity, and a world outside of you, which is how others influence who you are. This inner world can be hard to keep in touch with and remember — like trying to view an object through a small mirror — but this is what gives you guidance especially through difficult times. Without staying in touch with our inner world, we can lose sight of who we are. The principles that govern the core of our identity result from our families, our community, and the individual experiences we each have. We will all inevitably change in the future, but that change does not mean that we lose this inner world, and how it has been shaped by our time in high school. These years have undeniably changed each of us, so let us embrace that and remember the experiences that have come with them.

Going forward, I will have memories that I will cherish, and honestly, many of those memories arrive in the seemingly insignificant moments. I suppose that in crew, one day that sticks out to me was when Callum made a casual comment about how one of the wheels on his seat in the boat sounded funny, followed shortly with its bearing shattering without hope of repair, ending our practice after only fifteen minutes.

When the band went to Hawaii, a few of the guys to one side of our hotel room decided to play "Hot Cross Buns" off their balcony in the middle of the afternoon, and I soon learned that Wilson was in the hotel room next to mine when he stepped out onto his balcony and yelled at them to, “go back inside or get better music!”

In class, one of my personal favorites was during an English class when Aedan and I had to give a presentation on Horatio Nelson. Mrs. Burke had encouraged videos for this project, and one of the first videos that came up under a google search for “Horatio Nelson” was a pronunciation guide of his name. The video was an unchanging image of the words “Horatio Nelson'' typed in large, Times New Roman font on a white background with a person repeatedly saying only “Horatio Nelson” at spaced out intervals. We decided that we had to include this riveting video in our presentation — immediately after our title slide. After getting up in front of the class to deliver our presentation, we played the video of a disinterested voice flatly repeating his name four or five times. We then followed the grand display of pronunciation by mispronouncing “viscount,” quite literally the next word in our presentation.

These moments could include a memorable discussion in class. I remember a physics class about thermodynamics when someone asked what happens when a fork gets put in a toaster. The roller coaster of a discussion this sparked ended with whether microwaves cause cancer. (If you are curious about the answer, it was a definite no because they do not have enough energy to be a form of ionizing radiation.) I know that each of us has those small memories that can anchor our feelings now and remind us of who we are.

The memories might just include a small habit, like chatting with Phil in the commons, even though you know that you really should be getting back to Bio right about then, or the various mentions of mouth pipetting in our chemistry class, followed by Mrs. Kelley giving us the obligatory “that’s not proper lab procedure” warning. Apparently, it is safer and more accurate to use the actual pipettes.

Some of you may recognize a few of these instances, and I am sure that all of you have your own memories that stem from those seemingly insignificant moments. We should all take a little time to look back on them, and realize what they mean to each of us individually. I implore each of you to keep finding those moments — wherever they come — so that we can continue to find comfort and happiness in the little moments. Keep making these memories, big or small, blunder or genius, those will continue to define us, and keep us grounded, even in times like these.

I will finish with a quote by a great poet, Lord Alfred Tennyson. I want to give some background for how I stumbled onto this quote because I think how I found it speaks nearly as much to what I have been trying to address as the quote speaks for the last point that I want to make. I never would have looked for quotes by Tennyson if it were not for an obscure literary reference in a James Joyce novel we read in Mrs. Burke’s class. We had a discussion about an event in the novel that brought two of the characters into a fistfight over whether Lord Byron or Tennyson was a better poet. I wanted to see if I recognized anything that Tennyson had written, but instead I found a quote that has become very meaningful to me recently, and one that I have reminded myself of when I am not having a great day. He wrote, “hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, ‘it will be happier.’”

As we begin to navigate this new normal, after high school and reintegrating our normal lives after all the closures and changes, there will probably be days that we need to remind ourselves that we are not defeated, and it will be happier.

(Ryan McTigue is the Valedictorian of Lyme-Old Lyme High School.)