i was sitting at a bar in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, complaining about the Pike and the Mass-hole drivers, when i first realized i had become an adult. This will happen to you too. As i look out at your young faces, i can’t help but think The family sold Benjy’s pasture so Quentin could go to Harvard because that’s the only line from The Sound and the Fury i remember, that being the only book i can really remember. i have trouble retaining information. Truely, it’s in one ear, out the other. But you will not be like me. You have studied hard, competed well in a time of diminishing returns. The private sector will ask even more of you though, perhaps even your very lives, and you will not hesitate. There are workarounds: i for one will leave a steaming cup of coffee on my desk at 5:30 so people will think i’m still in the office. Don’t worry; you will be great, while i have struggled merely to be good. Going around thinking in the movie of my life, my boss shall be played by Shia LaBeouf, will not get you far. i’ve learned this the hard way. You’re not in the classroom anymore; stories won’t always make sense. There is no lesson in the time my father tricked the Mormon missionaries who knocked on our door into doing yard work for him, except keep your head down, and hope your father will forget to send you out into the yard too. i say this as one sent into the yard with the missionaries. Often, my life seems a series of middling to spectacular failures, though i take comfort in the fact even the great Faulkner got so loaded he lost his Nobel Prize, but found it the next day in a potted plant. There will be difficulties, yes, but they are, in truth, victories. i’m at an age where my parents’ friends have begun dying; each time one of them goes, i wish i was a saint. Well, wishing won’t make it true. It takes dedication, plus a number of little deaths. Some nights, you’ll dream about work, which seems a waste of a dream. Some nights, it will just be you and the bad decisions you’ve made. It’s then that you need to believe in the goodness of your destiny, even if it’s so far away from what you wanted. Oh, how i wish i was sitting where you’re sitting, armed with hope and a topic sentence, ready to make your beginning. There are a million no, a billion, tote bags out there; i can’t wait to see the one you pick, the shadow puppets you will make, all the children you will carve out of soap.
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Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. His first full-length collection of poems, A Reading from the Book of Panic, was published by Lavender Ink in 2025.