You are such beautiful people … who are here to remember a beautiful young man. I need you to dream with me for a few moments. Please, come along …
Ali Mirza … exists, and will continue to exist … through you, through us, through our stories.
As his teacher at Staples, I was able to read and write and learn alongside a wonderful young man. I learned a great deal about LIFE through Ali’s presence in my classroom … and, clearly, many of you learned many of the same lessons through your relationships with Ali.
Dream along with me for a few more moments.
He smiled understandingly — much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point [he] vanished …
The “He” of the passage I just read aloud to you is about Jay Gatsby, the central figure of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” … but I know, from now on, that passage will bring me back to Ali’s smile. Maybe it will do the same for you.
I think I need to laugh. Remember Ali’s love of sneakers … of sneaker culture … and of self-expression, in general? Yeah, me too.
Here’s a quick one about Ali. He wanted to write his jr. research paper--yes, THE Staples junior research paper--on sneakers. Umm … What? I thought. But after 5 minutes of conference with Ali, I said yes … go.
Here’s where Ali’s charm … and the smile we all know … came into play: Ali, just as he was turning in his paper, decided to become my fashion consultant--he wanted me to wear these to work. “Geraghty … buy these … Cool Greys … you can do it … they go well with a suit and tie … and you can rock them on dress-down Friday. Ali was the kind of guy who would say 'Mr. Geraghty, I think Shakespeare needs new shoes.’ (I'm still not even sure what he meant by that, but he said with a smile.
Sneakers have been transformed for me because of Ali … because Ali understood their metaphorical resonances … and he taught me to think about self-expression in a new way. Ali wrote about how hip-hop and self-expression in the 80s was tied to sneakers. How sneakers became a powerful form of non-verbal communication. These observations were then paralleled the growth of urban identity and iconic heroes such as Michael Jordan. Powerful stuff for a young man to be writing about. The ambiguities, the complexities.
Just a few more ...
Kim Herzog (formerly Palca), teacher of English: “I never wanted to leave school when Ali came to the Invisible Children club. At bake sales, he sold everything. People didn’t want the cake; they bought the cake because Ali was selling the cake.”
Early childhood classroom memory … Ali almost kneeled before the kids. He was always on their level, looking them in them in the eyes and smiling. His voice was that of a brother, a father, a teacher, a young man who loved to watch things grow and communicate and learn and spread love.
I want to end with a few quotes from the book “The Things They Carried” … and I want you to think of Ali with me:
“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way, memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.”
“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.”
“But this too is true: stories can save us.”
Isn’t that why we are reading this right now?
Posts
