I had an opportunity last Sunday to address the undergraduate and graduate students in Ithaca College's class of 2009.  They compiled a remarkable record of scholarship and service while at IC, and I expect great things from them in the future.  In my remarks, I noted the seeming irony that the ceremony held to mark completion of their degree programs is called a "Commencement," or beginning.  However, receiving a higher education degree is simultaneously a completion and a beginning, just like every other major life transition. 

I mentioned in my brief speech that I had a different kind of commencement less than two weeks ago, when my wife Amber and I experienced the birth of our first child.  Liam's arrival most definitely marked the end of one phase of our family life and the beginning of another, and so I offered the graduates a few observations baed on my experience of the last two weeks.  Specifically, how can you know if your commencement is going well?

If you look at the sky and the trees and everything around you, and you feel as if you are seeing these things for the first time, then you are having a successful commencement.

If you find yourself intellectually and emotionally drawn to subjects that never held much interest for you before, then you are probably having a very good commencement.

If you find new meaning and deep value in all your relationships with other people, then you just might be having an excellent commencement.

If you realize that great things come in little packages, and that beauty is found in the smallest of details, then you are on track for a revelatory commencement.

If you find yourself getting less sleep, but you still feel more alive than ever before, then congratulations. Your commencement is everything a commencement can and should be.

As I did at our graduation ceremony, I would like to take this opportunity as well to wish each member of the Ithaca College class of 2009 a wonderful commencement into the next phase of their lives.  We know that an Ithaca College education tranforms our students; this particular group of graduates also had a huge impact on Ithaca College.  I am sure that our graduates will have many transformative commencements to come.

When I was about to be born, my father drove my mother to the hospital and then was shooed back home by the doctors and nurses to wait for news.  While waiting at home, he put on his best white shirt -- his way of expressing respect for the importance of the moment.  Eventually the doctor called to say he was the father of a healthy baby boy, and my dad drove back to the hospital to see my mother and me.  For the next day or two, he never got closer to me than a look through the window of the nursery.

It was a bit different for the birth of William Thomas Rochon this morning.  The birthing manual provided by our doctor indicated that I should go to the hospital in a shirt that I would not mind getting dirty.  There were moments in the delivery room when I wished I had been sent home to wait, but those days are long gone.  Not only was I present for the birth, but in the twelve hours since then I have never been more than four feet from my son.

Unlike the mystery of birth when I was born a half century ago, Amber and I had long since learned the sex of our child.  We already knew his health status on many dimensions thanks to the results of a variety of tests.  We had not only listened to his heart, but watched it beat.  We had counted his fingers and toes, and even looked at his face.  We thought we had already met him prior to birth, thanks to the miracles of technology.

We could not have been more wrong.  Digitized pictures in utero do not approximate the encounter of another life at the moment of birth.  No matter what else has changed over the last half century, it remains a time-stopping experience to hear the first small cry of a tiny baby newly emerged into a very big world.  That first cry penetrates a parent's heart with the realization that this life is ours -- not in the sense of possession but in the sense of responsibility.

Amber and I are both pretty stoic under normal circumstances, but that first cry moved us each to tears.  We had been told again and again by friends and well-wishers that this would be a transformative moment in our lives, a "before and after" watershed event.  And we knew this would be true.  But until this morning we had no idea what that would actually mean in terms of our thoughts and emotions.

Happy birth day Liam.