We were quickly escorted to a door around the back, where Daniel and I could get inside without being hassled by college students. The average charity even was one thing - they usually mobbed the actors or singers more than anyone. But in this crowd, Daniel was basically Elvis.
I giggled at the thought, but refused to answer when he asked me what was so funny.
After a few minutes, someone escorted me to a reserved seat on the side of the auditorium, far away from the crowd. I felt many eyes on me, some of them probably recognizing me even in the low lighting, and others trying to figure out who I was.
Daniel had been preparing his speech for weeks, with one of the kids from creative who had a knack for pulling that kind of thing together. He’d never performed it in front of me, but by now, I was confident he knew how to deliver a solid keynote address.
I cleared my throat and shifted in my seat. I hated feeling like I was under a microscope, but there was really no avoiding it in this kind of crowd. Most of them, by now, had probably either guessed who I was or Googled me. I made a valiant attempt to suck in my stomach, even as I realized it would make absolutely no difference.
The most awkward part of this would be listening to the dean or the university’s president introducing Daniel. When he’d given the keynote at the graduation for a tiny tech school upstate, the president of the college came out and gave a listing of Daniel’s virtues and accomplishments that was so flowery I felt embarrassed. I couldn’t imagine how much his ears must burn as he waited off-stage.
Suddenly, I felt someone slide into the seat next to me. At first I thought it must be my chaperone from backstage, keeping me company, but I didn’t want to turn and look to avoid seeming rude.
“Did I miss anything?” Walter’s voice surprised me.
I stared at him.
“Excuse me, I’m sorry,” said my chaperone, from a few feet away. “He just - he just came in, just now.”
“Thanks for saving me a spot,” he said, leaning back.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” I muttered, under my breath.
“Well,” said Walter. “I didn’t want to miss this. Considering I’ve missed almost everything else for the last few years.”
“That’s nice thought,” I said.
Walter nodded, staring at the foot of the stage in front of us.
“You’re very opinionated,” he said, at last.
“Thank you,” I replied.
“And that,” he said, a smile creeping across his face. “‘Thank you.’ That’s why Danny likes you. I figured it out, didn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “You’d have to ask him.”
“There’s one thing I won’t argue with you about,” he said. “About losing my son. You said I still have time, but it’s running out. I thought about it, and I can see you’re right.”
I nodded, seeing the curtain rustle off to the side of the stage.
“There’s a lot of things I could have done differently,” he said. “Looking back, I wish I’d thought about things more carefully, sometimes. I realized, after what you said - this is one of those times.” He was chewing on his bottom lip, a gesture I knew very well. “If I don’t play my cards right, I’m going to lose my chance with him.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said, softly, as a middle-aged man in a mortar board walked out in stage. He came up to the lectern, introduced himself as the president of the school, and quickly launched into what I hoped was going to be the most cringe-inducing part of my night.
“…launched his eventually multi-billion dollar company as a teenager, first headquartered in a dilapidated frat house with red cups scattered all over the lawn.” He stopped and smiled. “Fourteenth Ave house, are you out there?” There was a polite chorus of chuckles. “I’d like to point out that I’m pretty sure that’s just been added to this anecdote for color, the cups on the lawn were not necessarily integral to his success. Within just a few years, his sales were rising fast enough to make waves in the technology world. His competitors weren’t worried - at first. But now, the Plum 5 is probably in about half of the pockets in this room - and the Plum 4.5 in the other half.” He smiled. “Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Daniel Thorne, here to accept his honorary PhD.”
He came out, robes swishing behind him, smiling and shaking the president’s hand. He took the framed degree and tucked it under his arm before standing at the lectern.
His eyes scanned the room. When they settled on me, and flickered over to Walter beside me, I tried to read some change in his expression. But there was none that I could detect.
“For the record, I couldn’t have done it without the red cups,” he said.
The hall roared with laughter.
He had to raise his hand to get them to quiet down. “I was on the fence,” he said, loudly to be heard over the residual noise, and then everyone finally fell silent. “I was on the fence, about my topic tonight. I had something prepared, but in light of recent events, it seems silly to talk about that now.” He paused, let out a long breath, and looked up at the room.
“Just a few short weeks ago, my estranged father came back into my life. I know many of you are still likely living at home during the summer, and most of you probably still put up with your parents, in one way or another. But there are some of you out there, I’m sure, who can hardly be in the same room as their parents without a fight breaking out. Maybe, once you’ve graduated and gotten a job, you plan to cut down contact to one phone call every other holiday.” He let his eyes fix on the middle of the room. “Or less.”
Everyone was silent.
“You might think I’m planning to tell you that you should be grateful to have them in your lives,” he said. “No matter what. But I’m not going to tell you that. I’m just going to tell you about my father.”
He paused for a long moment.
“Growing up, I wanted the same things every little kid wanted. All the latest toys, the video game consoles - this was back when there were still cartridges, if you’ve ever run across one of those artifacts in your basement - but there wasn’t always enough money to go around. We never went without anything that we needed, and there were always presents on holidays. But I never had some of the things the other kids had.”
He smiled. “Until, one year, my dad managed to get me a Nintendo. I marveled at that thing, even though it was already a few years out of date. I remember staring at it, turning it over and over and trying to divine its secrets. At night, all I dreamed about was finding the secret to that device. I figured it had to make sense, somehow. If someone else could it invent it, I could invent something like it. It was just a matter of gluing the right parts together in the right order, and suddenly I’d be making…”
Looking around the room, his smile waned a little.
“But I didn’t know,” he said. “And right away, I realized that was a problem. If I was going to commit myself to something like this, at the ripe age of eight, I had to have a business plan.”
The room was taken with subdued laughter.
Besides me, I could almost feel Walter cringing. I knew this was a piece of his history that he wasn’t particularly proud of.
“So I started looking through business magazines and newspapers. I figured someone must have Nintendo’s sales numbers, somewhere. I was right. There were figures in there, vague ones, not really intended for the kind of in-depth projection I was doing.” He smiled. “I came up with some numbers that I liked quite a bit. Obviously, my next step was to find out what made this thing tick.
“I took it apart while my dad was out, even though I was pretty confident that he’d be impressed with my entrepreneurial skills once I explained my plan. On the other hand, I knew I’d been yelled at plenty of times for taking things apart that I wasn’t supposed to, so I decided to hedge my bets. Of course, the whole project took longer than I thought. I wasn’t allowed to use the camera anymore for semi-related reasons, so I tried to take as many detailed mental ‘snapshots’ as I could, before I put the thing back together. When he saw what I’d done, my dad didn’t give me a chance to explain at first. But even when I did, he thought it was ridiculous.
“The point here isn’t to make fun of my dad for not knowing I was going to be Daniel Thorne. No one could possibly predict that, least of all him. If you met a parent who was convinced that their child was going to be the next Steve Jobs, you’d find that person insufferable. My dad was never like that. He kept me grounded. He wanted me to set the kind of goals for myself that I could actually succeed in. He didn’t want to see me shoot for the stars, only to crash.
“What he wanted for me, more than anything, was to avoid some of the pain that he had experienced in his own life. All parents are like this, even if they don’t always express it very clearly. When they fight with you about a decision you’ve made, it’s because they love you. They love you more than they can bear.
“I’m going to become a father next year.” He gave them a moment to digest this, but the room stayed silent. “So naturally, I’ve given this issue some thought. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that I can do to make this easier on myself. Already, I find myself consumed with worry. I know once my daughter’s grown up and moved away, it will only get worse. I won’t be able to protect her anymore. And no matter how hard I try, I may not always be able to convince her that she’s about to make the wrong decision.
“And I’m grateful for that. Because I know that I, like my father, and his father before him, and every father in the world, am going to make mistakes. I am going to be wrong. From time to time, I will hurt her. She will sometimes look at me and think that I must be the cruelest person in the world. I don’t want any of this to happen, but I know I can’t stop it. I can look into my feature just as clearly as if I had a crystal ball
“But I don’t, of course. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? I don’t know what my daughter’s future is going to be, and she will be the only one who can make it happen. There’s no one else in the world who can choose for her. Not even her mother. Not even me.
“That will be the hardest thing I ever need to come to terms with. All I can hope is that if I go too far off track, my wife Maddy will let me know.”
He paused, and smiled again.
“You will make mistakes,” he said. “You will all make mistakes in your lives, and not all of them will be in something as important and raising a human being. But there will be times when you feel sure you’ve made a mistake that you can’t recover from. You’ll want to give up. You’ll be so overwhelmed with frustration and fear that you’ll forget something very important.
“If you want it enough, you can always get a second chance.”
I looked over to see Walter’s reaction, and to my complete and utter surprise, his eyes were brimming with tears.