Nicholas Graduates

Grace and Nick back in April in Greece.  Unfortunately, the building they went to see seems to have been quite run down.

This post is at least a week late.  Last week, my oldest son, Nicholas, graduated from Veritas Academy.  He tied with another classmate, Grace Hornok, for the honor of being the valedictorian.  These two bright and enjoyable students make up the entire graduating class of Veritas Academy.

I never thought I would be teaching in a small school with only 2 graduates.  But what we lack in quantity, we make up for in quality.  Both Grace and Nick are musicians and literary students.  (And both have taken calculus and physics during their senior year.) Both are Christians with a real zeal for sound doctrine and dedicated application.

I am jealous of them.  Both are going to Wheaton College.  There, they will be close to a great host of Lewis and Inklings artifacts.  They will be on one of the major Christian campuses in America.  We three studied lots of books together, ranging from James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner, from Homer to Dostoevsky.  I don't think it fair that they have such a foundation at so young an age and they get to devote the next four years to learning.  Meanwhile, I am getting notices from AARP that I am elgible to join.  (No thanks, AARP supports too many liberal causes for me.)

I am thrilled and saddened by Nick's graduating.  He has been the right hand man in my classes.  Whenever I cannot remember a quote or I confuse a fact, he usually knows the answer.  He is an amazing student of history and literature, with a breadth of knowledge of music that astounds me.  I will be a lonely old man roaming the halls next year with a vacant look on my face.  Thankfully, I have three other kids in school with me and, hopefully, a whole new group yearning to learn of Homer and Dostoevsky and Faulkner and Melville and Paul Johnson and Abraham Kuyper.


Nick doesn't always maintain this style. He was dressed for a concert with the Texarkana Regionale Chorale.


This poem was written years ago:


Nicholas Goes To School

Today, my son, you shall begin learning to find answers,
Solve equations, write letters and numbers, decipher words,
To shade hills and rabbits in different colors, to join
With your books in hand in circles reading with the bluebirds.

I long for and dread the great journeys: the epic travails
When Zeus wills Achilleus’ rage and God wills Adam’s fall
With page upon page of Homer and Milton burrowing
Into your transfixed thoughts and your heart pounds hearing the call.

When Jackson’s long circuitous route sent forth with Lee’s prayer
Crumples a flank before the night volley hits the Stonewall,
And while your left arms aches in expected amputation,
From your desk at Chancellorsville; you weep, seeing the fall.

There are so many hills and roads I want you to travel,
On some I’ve long waited for you to join me on the way.
But others you’ll take while I stand behind waving you on,
Anxious for your tales of what you saw you’ll report someday.

You will learn the surgical precision of mathematics,
Music’s metered sound, the trampling of the pagan sciences
By dinosaurs to extinction, and the glorious defeat
By the Church militant of hate-filled clay alliances.

You will learn that each tall mountain peak reveals one higher;
Each river discovered bends to the sound of falls below;
You’ll grow ravenously hungry without hope of filling
As you, we pray, in the light of God’s grace and knowledge grow.