Commencement speeches, with their mix of sage advice and celebration, mark a rite of passage and a chance to catch up with wisdom from people who have accomplished a thing or two in their fields. Plus the speeches are fun to read. Here are a few that I sampled.
Hold our country to its promise: Sally Yates
Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general whom President Trump fired for refusing to carry out a travel ban that violates the First Amendment, delivered remarks for Class Day at Harvard Law School.
Regardless of whether you go into private practice, or the corporate world, whether you become a public defender, a prosecutor or a public interest advocate, you are now a lawyer. And that means that you have not only a unique opportunity and ability that non-lawyers don’t have, but also the attendant responsibility to foster justice in this world. To reveal truth. To stand up for the voiceless. To hold our country to its promise of equal justice for all.
The people of this country care deeply about these values. They care about the rule of law, and our constitution, and the principles and freedoms on which our country was founded. And they are counting on you, the lawyers, to, in Bobby Kennedy’s words, ‘breathe life and force’ into the ‘promise of liberty and justice.’
A sense of purpose: Mark Zuckerberg
On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, addressed the graduates of Harvard University.
Today I want to talk about purpose. But I’m not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose. We’re millennials. We’ll try to do that instinctively. Instead, I’m here to tell you finding your purpose isn’t enough. The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.
Defend truth: Hillary Clinton
On Friday, Hillary Clinton addressed graduates of Wellesley College, her alma mater:
Don’t be afraid of your ambition, of your dreams, or even your anger. Those are powerful forces. But harness them to make a difference in the world. Stand up for truth and reason. Do it in private, in conversations with your family, your friends, your workplace, your neighborhoods, and do it in public. In media posts, on social media, or grab a sign and head to a protest. Make defending truth and a free society a core value of your life every single day.
Life is about significance: Cory Booker
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker addressed the graduating class at Penn:
Ultimately, life is not about celebrity, it’s about significance; life is not about popularity, it’s about purpose; life is not how many people show up when you’re dead but about how many people you show up for while you are alive.
You’re never not afraid: Will Ferrell
Will Ferrell addressed graduates at the University of Southern California, the actor’s alma mater.
You’re never not afraid. I’m still afraid. I was afraid to write this speech. And now, I’m just realizing how many people are watching me right now, and it’s scary. Can you please look away while I deliver the rest of the speech? But my fear of failure never approached in magnitude my fear of what if. What if I never tried at all?
Your station in life does not define you: Howard Schultz
Howard Schultz, former chief executive of Starbucks, delivered the commencement address at Arizona State University
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in public housing. The projects, as it was called back then. My parents were both high school dropouts, and they could barely afford $96 a month rent in our two-bedroom apartment for my brother, my sister and my parents. However, from my earliest of memories, my mother instilled in me her belief in the American dream and the promise of America. That a good education and hard work will open the doors to a better life, and that provides me with an important lesson to share with you all today. That your station in life does not define you and the promise of America that is for all of us.
We can build resilience: Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, addressed the graduating class at Virginia Tech. There she spoke of her husband’s death two years ago.
The most important thing I learned is that we are not born with a certain amount of resilience. It is a muscle, and that means we can build it. We build resilience into ourselves. We build resilience into the people we love. And we build it together, as a community. That’s called “collective resilience.” It’s an incredibly powerful force – and it’s one that our country and our world need a lot more of right about now. It is in our relationships with each other that we find our will to live, our capacity to love, and our ability to bring change into this world.
Avoid intellectual walls: Lee Bollinger
Columbia University President Lee Bollinger addressed the class of 2017.
We should avoid, if at all possible, heedlessly erecting walls—intellectual walls—that will impair our ability to understand and engage our modern, interconnected world. For the world today is imbued with profound issues and needs that, however much we might wish otherwise, are simply not going away—that no wall can block—and that deserve as much attention and thought as our collective minds can possibly muster.
Imagine the possibilities when we remove imbalance: Pharrell Williams
Pharrell Williams, the musician, songwriter and producer, addressed graduates of New York University.
Speaking to you guys today has me charged up. As you find your ways to serve humanity, it gives me great comfort knowing this generation is the first that understands that we need to lift up our women. Imagine the possibilities when we remove imbalance from the ether. Imagine the possibilities when women are not held back. Your generation is unraveling deeply entrenched laws, principles and misguided values that have held women back for far too long and therefore, have held us all back. The world you will live in will be better for it.
A cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz in the latest issue of The New Yorker shows Patrick Henry, smartphone in hand, addressing Virginia’s House of Burgesses in 1775. “Give me liberty, or give me just one sec,” he says.
For me the scene summons an essay that Andrew Sullivan published in New York magazine recently that describes how an addiction to the bombardment of news and images that vie for our attention drove him into digital detox. Sullivan achieved renown as a writer and blogger at The Atlantic.com and The Daily Beast before starting “The Dish,” a blog that went on to garner tens of thousands of paying subscribers. The site achieved success, but by Sullivan’s own admission the work took its toll.
“For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours,” he writes. “If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out.”
All the social media, images and news produce what Sullivan calls “our enslavement to dopamine,” a diagnosis that may resonate with anyone who has been unable to resist checking their phone. Aside from servitude, prolonged use of smartphones can harm your posture and breathing, mess with your vision, hurt your hands and impair your memory, studies show.
Give me liberty, indeed.
Two years ago, I took a summer off from social media to study for the bar exam. Amid the effort, which required willing all my attention to study for hours on end, I felt the burden of distraction fade. I realized it when, after a while, Twitter and Facebook both sent notifications to remind me that I hadn’t visited. One thing social media seems to dislike is our refusing to socialize.
And it wasn’t an age thing. I studied that summer aside millennials who told me of experiencing a similar relief.
That’s not to deny what Sullivan terms “the pleasures of being connected.” If you are someone who, like I do, welcomes a queue at checkout as an excuse to read the news on his or her phone, or who loves tweets like the one below, you know what enjoyment those in-between moments can be.
My freshman year in college, I subscribed by mail to my hometown newspaper. Every few days, a bundle of the papers arrived in brown wrapper. Going to my mailbox, I could not imagine that one day I might carry a computer in my pocket that would allow me to read the news from anywhere in the world. In real time. And to comment on and share it with anyone or with everyone.
Sullivan writes that he fears for the cost of a life lived online more than off. “But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together,” he notes. “You are where your attention is.”
True. Though it can be convenient to blame technology for behavior. In a memoir published recently, Robert Gottlieb, who led a storied career as an editor at The New Yorker, Simon & Schuster, and Knopf, recalls his bookishness. Dwight Garner, who reviewed the book for the Times, wrote:
How bookish was Mr. Gottlieb? At summer camp, as a child, he arranged to have The New York Times delivered to him daily. His family — they lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — read books rather than converse at the dinner table. “Only later did it occur to me that this was not normal,” he writes in “Avid Reader,” his new memoir, “but a symptom of our particular brand of dysfunction.”
Of course, we choose what and whom to pay attention to. A friend told me this week that he deleted the Twitter and Facebook apps on his phone because they had started to cut into his reading.
Mike Murphy recently wrote for Quartz about his decision to stop wearing an Apple Watch after a series of dizzy spells that sent him to see a doctor. The doctor prescribed a vacation without an internet-connected device.
The worrying came from the watch, which sent news alerts, Facebook alerts “or reminders to check-in somewhere or that there was a Starbucks nearby,” Murphy writes. The notifications sent his heart rate skyward. “The Apple Watch is the most anxiety-inducing piece of technology I’ve ever owned,” he says. “It’s a reminder that a worry is like a notification, which left unchecked, can consume you.”
Oliver Sacks, neurologist and writer, died Sunday at age 82. I did not know Dr. Sacks but had the privilege of swimming in an adjacent lane many mornings several years ago in Chelsea.
Tonight I read for the first time an essay he wrote about swimming that was published in The New Yorker, May 26, 1997. In it, Dr. Sacks recalls how he learned to swim by imitating his father’s strokes. Another parallel: My father swims still, at age 84.
Here’s how the essay concludes:
“There is an essential rightness about swimming, as about all such flowing and, so to speak, musical activities. And then there is the wonder of buoyancy, of being suspended in this thick, transparent medium that supports and embraces us. One can move in water, play with it, in a way that has no analogue in the air. One can explore its dynamics, its flow, this way and that; one can move one’s hands like propellers or direct them like little rudders; one can become a little hydroplane or submarine, investigating the physics of flow with one’s own body.
And beyond this, there is all the symbolism of swimming—it’s imaginative resonances, its mythic potentials.
My father called swimming ‘the elixir of life,’ and certainly it seemed to be so for him: he swam daily, slowing down only slightly with time, until the grand age of ninety-four. I hope I can follow him, and swim till I die.”
Facebook cannot challenge the constitutionality of a search warrant on its users’ behalf prior to the government’s executing the warrant, an appeals court in New York has ruled in a decision that delineates a boundary for Internet privacy.
The ruling follows a lawsuit by Facebook to void 381 search warrants the company received two years ago from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which obtained then in connection with an investigation into Social Security disability claims by a group of retired firefighters and police officers whom the DA suspected of feigning illness they attributed to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Upon receiving the warrants, which sought information derived from the users’ accounts, Facebook asked the DA to withdraw the warrants or to strike a provision that directed the company to refrain from disclosing their existence to users whose postings were to be searched. The DA’s office asserted the confidentiality requirement was needed to prevent the suspects being investigated from destroying evidence or fleeing the jurisdiction if they knew they were being investigated.
After the DA declined to withdraw the warrants, Facebook sued to either quash them or compel the DA remove the non-disclosure provision. The trial court sided with the DA and Facebook appealed.
The appeals court affirmed that the legality of the searches could be determined only after the searches themselves were conducted. “There is no constitutional or statutory right to challenge an alleged defective warrant before it is executed,” Judge Dianne Renwick wrote for a unanimous panel of the court’s appellate division in a ruling released July 21. “We see no basis for providing Facebook a greater right than its customers are afforded.”
The constitutional requirement that a warrant can issue only upon a showing of probable cause as determined by a judicial officer helps to ensure the government does not exceed its authority when requesting a search warrant and eliminates the need for a suspect to make a motion to void the warrant before it can be served, the court noted. “Indeed… the sole remedy for challenging the legality of a warrant is by a pretrial suppression motion which, if successful, will grant that relief,” Renwick explained.
According to Facebook, which was joined in the appeal by Google, Twitter, Microsoft and other tech industry firms, the federal Stored Communications Act also gave the company the right to challenge the warrants. But that law, which protects the privacy of email and other communications stored on servers belonging to ISPs, authorizes ISPs to challenge subpoenas and court orders but not warrants obtained from a judicial officer based on a showing of probable cause, the court noted.
Despite its ruling, the court agreed with Facebook that the DA’s serving 381 warrants swept broadly and suggested the users themselves may have grounds for suppression. “Facebook users share more intimate personal information through their Facebook accounts than may be revealed through rummaging about one’s home,” wrote Renwick. “These bulk warrants demanded ‘all’ communications in 24 broad categories from the 381 targeted accounts. Yet, of the 381 targeted Facebook users accounts only 62 were actually charged with any crime.”
Through civil liberties groups hoped the appeal might bolster protections for Internet privacy, experts said the ruling makes sense as a matter of law. As Orin Kerr, a professor of criminal procedure at George Washington University Law School who has written extensively about privacy and the Internet, wrote in The Washington Post:
“Think about how this plays out in an old-fashioned home search. If the cops show up at your door with a warrant to search your house, you have to let them search. You can’t stop them if you have legal concerns about the warrant. And if a target who is handed a warrant can’t bring a pre-enforcement challenge, then why should Facebook have greater rights to bring such a challenge on behalf of the targets, at least absent legislation giving them that right?”
Still, “that doesn’t mean the warrants were valid,” added Kerr, who imagined that the defendants themselves seem likely to challenge the sweep of the material seized from their Facebook accounts if they haven’t already.
For its part, Facebook disagreed with the ruling but said the company had not decided whether to appeal. “We continue to believe that overly broad search warrants—granting the government the ability to keep hundreds of people’s account information indefinitely—are unconstitutional and raise important concerns about the privacy of people’s online information,” Jay Nancarrow, a spokesman for the company, told the Times.
The DA’s office noted that the investigation led to the indictment of 134 people and alleged hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud. “In many cases, evidence on [the suspects’] Facebook accounts directly contradicted the lies the defendants told to the Social Security Administration,” Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, said in a statement.
It’s Sunday, about 1:30 pm, and I’ve been to three wireless stores since noon.
The journey has taken me from 125th St. in Harlem to 86th and Broadway to 71st Street.
Reason for my trip: to activate an iPhone 4 that I’ve had for the past four-and-a-half years, the last two of which it occupied a shelf above my desk.
My girlfriend is visiting from South Africa. She uses a US phone on this side.
She had a phone that ran on Verizon—one of those clamshell designs—that she lost on a recent visit. She kept the number, which her sister paid for monthly. My girlfriend says she has no attachment to the number except that her boss knows it. He calls her on it.
For a week she went without a phone. To reach her, I texted her via Skype to her MacBook. But today she’s off to Boston, which her employer calls home.
She needs a phone that works. Cue the iPhone 4, which I charged in anticipation of her visit.
I misremembered that I had bought the phone from AT&T, thinking instead that it came from Verizon Wireless. That mistake explains everything that ensued.
The saga began a day earlier, at a T-Mobile store at 96th and Broadway. We brought the iPhone there to buy a SIM card that would activate the phone on T-Mobile’s network, where we—or more accurately T-Mobile—would carry over my girlfriend’s number from Verizon.
The sales representative at T-Mobile snapped a new SIM card off from credit card-sized piece of plastic, inserted it into the phone and turned on the device. We brightened momentarily before realizing the phone would not work.
“It’s locked by Verizon,” the representative told us, repeating the misinformation I had supplied inadvertently. “There’s nothing we can do. You have to take it to Verizon.”
“What’s the lowest-priced phone you have?” my girlfriend asked him. He showed her a phone that runs on Android and cost $20.
“I’ll take it,” my girlfriend said. At least she would have a phone, no matter how little it resembled a phone that she might want.
At home Saturday night, my girlfriend’s sister, a different sibling than the one who preserved the phone number, and I researched how to unlock a phone from Verizon.
On Sunday morning, equipped with the information, I called Verizon. The first representative I reached told me that Verizon cannot unlock a smartphone that ran on its network. That didn’t seem right.
I called again. A different representative gave me two six-digit codes that he said I could use to unlock the phone. “These will cost you money if you go online to sites that sell unlocking,” he offered before directing me to an article in Gizmodo about how to unlock an iPhone 4.
That didn’t help either.
I decided to take the phone to the Verizon Wireless outpost on 125th St. The place opened at noon. I resolved to be first in line.
I arrived at the store, located at the corner of 125th St. and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, about 10 minutes early. While I waited, I met AGR, a rapper who was hawking “King of the Industry,” his latest disc. “I’m working with RZA of Wu-Tang,” AGR told me, without commenting on the symmetry between the number of initials in their monikers.
For $10, I could own a copy of AGR’s latest, which, he explained to me, contains no references to sex or drugs. “But aren’t drugs and sex subjects for art too?” I asked him.
“Yes, but what am I going to do, rap to the kids about using crack?” he replied. Rather than press the point, I forked over $10 in exchange for the disc, which AGR autographed to my girlfriend.
I hope she likes it.
By then it was noon and I saw the manager at Verizon Wireless kneel to unlock the double doors to the store. I construed the gesture as a metaphor for what awaited my phone.
I bounded inside. She asked how she could help.
“I’d like to ask you to please unlock a Verizon phone that I haven’t used in at least three years,” I explained. “I used to have a contract but that was then. I think you can unlock it now.”
“We can’t unlock the phone unless you are on Verizon,” she replied.
“Isn’t the point of unlocking the phone so that I don’t have to be on Verizon?” I asked. “Besides, refusing to unlock a phone unless I’m on Verizon sounds illegal.”
I imagine the last thing someone who works at a Verizon store on Sundays wants to hear is that what they’re doing is unlawful.
“Companies do it all the time,” she said.
As if that would persuade me.
“Tell you what, maybe you can confirm that the phone is a Verizon phone,” I offered. “Maybe my recollection is wrong.”
“But you told me it’s a Verizon phone,” she said.
“Yes, I did, but perhaps my memory is faulty,” I answered. “It can happen to any of us,” I added, gesturing toward the pedestrians on the street outside.
I held up the phone to her while pressing an icon on the display that flashes the phone’s International Mobile Station Equipment Identity (IMEI number), the 15-digit number that identifies most mobile phones.
The manager gave a look that signaled a mixture of annoyance and resignation. “Please, just confirm that this is a Verizon phone,” I pleaded.
The manager gazed at the number. “It’s a Verizon phone,” she said. “That’s our number, it begins 040.”
I looked at the IMEI, which began 0240.
“Are you sure?” I asked, repeating back to her the digits. “I’m sure,” she replied. “Verizon phones start with 0240.”
I noted her confusion but attributed it to her wanting to be rid of me.
I thanked her and plopped down on a bench at the entrance to the store to map out my next move. I approached the counter again to ask another representative how much it would cost to activate the phone on Verizon’s network.
“That would be $45 a month, for unlimited talk and texts, plus one gigabyte of data,” he told me, looking up from his smartphone.
“Will the number remain in effect if my girlfriend only uses the service a few times a year when she’s in the states?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “The number cancels out at the end of 30 days unless you renew it.”
By now it was 12:15 pm. I had promised my girlfriend I would be home by 3:00 pm with a phone that worked and that she could take with her to Boston later that afternoon.
At 125th St. and Adam Clayton Powell, I hailed a taxi to take me to the Apple Store at 66th and Broadway. I would buy a new iPhone 6 and give my girlfriend my iPhone 5c. I’ve dithered about whether to go with a larger phone. Now seemed like the time.
As the taxi rolled along Central Park West, I gazed out at the buildings on my right. At 102nd St., we passed an apartment building where seven years ago I took guitar lessons from a musician who lived there. He once played in the band for the show “Rent.” He also liked to play tennis and would regale me with stories about matches he played on the red-clay courts in Riverside Park.
At around 96th Street a better idea came to me. Rather than buy a new phone, I would return to Verizon and activate the iPhone 4 on the carrier’s network. My girlfriend could bring both the T-Mobile phone and the iPhone with her to Boston. She would have to tote two phones but at least one of them appealed to her.
After her business trip, I would hold onto the iPhone 4. That way I could have a phone to use for calls and another—my iPhone 5c—for podcasts, music and all the rest of the things we do with those devices. All for $45 a month, which, while not free, beat the cost of a new phone.
I asked the driver to let me out at 86th and Broadway. Rather than return to Harlem and the manager whom I was persuaded hated me, I would find a Verizon Wireless store on the Upper West Side.
First, I had to use the restroom. I walked north along Broadway, expecting to find one of the Starbucks locations that litter Broadway what seems like every five blocks. Sure enough, I found one after about three.
Inside, a man who appeared to be about 60 years old waited for the restroom, the door to which displayed the red dial that signaled it was occupied. He had close-cropped silver hair and wore shorts and a t-shirt with something that I couldn’t decipher printed on it.
“You’re in line, right,?” I offered.
“I am,” he answered smiling, seemingly appreciating my checking with him.
After about 30 seconds I spoke up.
“The city needs more public restrooms,” I said. “It’s ridiculous that we all wait on line in Starbucks.”
The man brightened.
“I agree,” he said. “You wonder what people do in there. The guy who was in line before me gave up and left.”
“I don’t get why people take so much time,” I volunteered. “The last place I want to be is holed up is in a bathroom at Starbucks.
By then another gentleman, an African-American man who appeared to be about 50, had joined the line.
“We think someone’s taking a shower in there,” I said to him
“It’s terrible,” he said. “The way some people stay in there so long.
“Right, that’s what we were just discussing,” I replied, gesturing to the man ahead of me in the queue.
The three of us waited silently for about five minutes. Then the African-American man walked forward and rapped solidly on the door. No reply.
“Maybe someone should check to see if the person inside is conscious,” I offered.
“This is ridiculous,” said the man, returning to the queue.
“Have you seen the public restroom they installed recently on the east side of Union Square,” I asked them, proud of my offering some information that might be of value in the future. “We need more of that. Or like the restrooms at Bryant Park. Standing in line at Starbucks is hardly a substitute.”
Both men nodded in agreement.
I was on a roll. “I should run for City Council on a platform to add restrooms across the city,” I said.
“You’d have my vote,” said the man in front of me.
Just then we heard the handle of the bathroom door rattle. A woman, about 50 emerged, looking pale and exasperated.
She shook her head and looked at the man in front of me, as if he alone had interrupted her stay.
“I’ll be fast,” he told me.
“I’ll be fast too,” I told the man behind me.
The man kept his promise. He was in and out in what seemed like 20 seconds. I did the same.
“Take care, man,” I said to the African-American gentlemen as I left.
“You too,” he said, cementing our bond.
I stepped outside and onto Broadway, where Google Maps told me there was a Verizon Store at 80th St.
I walked south, glad to be outside on a mild spring afternoon. It was early enough that people seemed happy it was Sunday. They had yet to retreat to their apartments to steel themselves for the week.
A man passed me walking north, carrying an air conditioner that he had purchased at P.C. Richard & Sons, judging by the box. A block later, a young woman drifted over to a shelf of books that a bookseller had pushed onto the sidewalk to attract browsers.
As I approached 80th St., I saw the Verizon store on the opposite side of Broadway. Inside the store, the greeter asked for my name, which he logged on an iPad before telling me that I would be next in line.
I sat down on what I later realized to be the same style of bench that stood near the door at the Verizon store in Harlem. It’s hardly news that parts of Manhattan are being overrun by banks, nail salons and mobile phone stores. I shuddered as I realized that I had experienced the phenomenon from the inside.
In about 10 minutes, a man whose name tag read Jordan sat down next to me, smiled and asked how he could help.
“I would like to sign up for some prepaid Verizon wireless,” I told him, holding out the iPhone 4.
“Great, how do you anticipate using the phone?” he asked.
“For calls, mostly, I think,” I answered, feeling happy that we seemed to be getting somewhere.
Jordan told me the best plan would be one that costs $45 a month. Of course, I knew that already, but I thanked him anyway. By now it was nearly 1:00 pm and I began to calculate how much time I had left before I had to get back to my girlfriend in Harlem.
“May I see your ID?” Jordan asked.
I handed him my driver’s license and hoped that concluding the purchase would be as easy as his swiping my credit card.
“Is this your home address,” Jordan asked, holding the license.
“Yes, it is,” I replied, feeling satisfied with my deciding to update my license after moving last year.
Jordan excused himself to speak with a co-worker, whom I imagined to be a supervisor. I watched the men huddle for about a minute before Jordan returned.
“You say this is a Verizon phone?” he asked me. “Because as far as I can tell it’s not one of ours.”
“But the manager at your other store tells me it’s Verizon,” I replied.
“I’m sorry but it’s not,” he said. “Have you checked with T-Mobile, or with any other carrier. Maybe it’s AT&T or Sprint.”
Suddenly, I remembered.
“Oh, wow, it’s AT&T,” I said as the realization dawned. “Look, Jordan, you know that I wanted to buy Verizon service—you know that I was ready to sign up for prepaid wireless—but if I can unlock this my girlfriend can use her T-Mobile SIM with this phone.”
Jordan said he understood, and that he was happy to help. I wanted to run to the AT&T store, but I paused long enough to thank him again. We shook hands.
Back on Broadway, I headed south, past the Apthorp and Fairway, across the street at Gray’s Papaya, to 71st St., where an AT&T store occupies the northeast corner.
I entered to find two representatives helping customers at the counter while two ladies sat on a window ledge in the far corner of the store that faced the street.
“I imagine you’re waiting,” I said to them, smiling.
“I’ve been waiting for about 30 minutes,” said the younger of the two.
“Have they taken your names?” I asked.
“We think so,” said the other woman.
I approached the counter. “How do we register our visit?” I asked one of the two representatives. She wore a powder-blue polo shirt emblazoned with an AT&T.
She looked up at me distractedly. Just then, a representative in a royal blue polo shirt—a manager I hoped—emerged from the back room.
“How do we register for our visit?” I repeated, this time to him. “There are four of us back here,” I said, motioning to the two women. “We’re wondering.”
“There aren’t four of you,” said the manager.
“I count four—those women, me and this gentleman, here,” I said, gesturing toward a 60-something man hunched over some kind of self-service terminal.
“Have you registered?” I asked a 20-something man whom I had seen when I entered.
“I have,” he said in a European accent, smiling. “Thank you.”
I felt like an organizer. After three wireless stores in 90 minutes, the bureaucracy and procedures started to make sense to me.
The manager asked my name, which he entered into an iPad.
I retreated to the corner to take my place alongside the two women in the queue.
My turn came about 15 minutes later. A 20-something representative—she wore a navy polo shirt, the shades of blue seemed to darken with each representative—approached and asked how she could help.
“I would like to unlock this iPhone 4 that I got from AT&T several years ago,” I told her. “The contract has long lapsed. I don’t even have a phone number of it.”
“You have to put in a request online to do that,” she replied.
“What?” I replied, set back.
“This is the third wireless store I’ve visited today, and now you’re telling me I have to go online? Please, can’t we do this from here?” I implored.
The representative hesitated. Then she escorted me over to an iPad and punched up an online site at AT&T for unlocking phones.
“Go ahead and enter your information here,” she instructed.
I entered the IMEI, my name and email address. Three times I mistyped the captcha, which seemed especially tough to transpose.
After three tries, the representative nudged me aside and entered the phrase.
That produced a message telling me to check my in-box for an email that would confirm the unlocking.
I opened the email on my phone. “Click ok,” the representative told me, enrolling now.
I clicked. A second email arrived telling me that my request for an unlocked phone would be processed within two days.
“They say two days but it can be much faster,” said the representative. “Mine was unlocked the same day.”
That meant I might not be able to unlock the phone for my girlfriend in time for her trip but that eventually we’d get the phone working.
After thanking the representative and leaving the store, I imagined I could ship the phone to my girlfriend in Boston as soon as it worked.
On Broadway, I flagged a taxi to take me home. It was 1:45 pm and I didn’t want to risk the vagaries of weekend subway service.
As the taxi made its way up the West Side Highway, I happened to check my in-box, to see a third message from AT&T, this one congratulating me on my phone being unlocked.
According to the message, to complete the unlocking I needed to connect the phone with its original SIM card to iTunes.
Problem was, I no longer have the original SIM card.
Damn, I thought. Three stores and all that energy and I still may be unable to unlock the phone.
I resolved not to stress about it and to enjoy the ride along Riverside Park on a lovely day.
I called my sister to wish her happy Mother’s Day. I listened to a report by the BBC World Service about the new leader of South Africa’s main opposition.
I settled into the taxi, feeling assured by my effort and the initiative of the driver, who suggested a route that I knew made sense.
At home, my girlfriend gazed up from her work when I entered the apartment. I had stopped at a salad place and brought us both lunch.
I told her that I felt we were close to unlocking the phone, that I needed to try one more thing at the computer.
I went to my desk, inserted my girlfriend’s SIM card from T-Mobile into the iPhone and attached the phone to my computer. I double-clicked on iTunes. A message popped up to tell me that new settings from the carrier were available for download.
That seemed like a good sign. A few seconds after I accepted the settings a screen appeared. “Congratulations, your iPhone is unlocked,” it read.
I ejected the phone, adjusted the brightness of the display and walked into the living room to where my girlfriend sat on the couch, typing on her MacBook.
“Here’s your iPhone,” I said, handing the device to her.
She stood and embraced me. A breeze came through the window
Brush teeth. Headlines, Trevor Noah to host “The Daily Show.” Shower; 3 train. Dentist – teeth cleaning; follow-up April 23 to repair two fillings. Pinkberry – original with blueberries and strawberries. New York Public Library – Jefferson Market, read about U.S. immigration law. Buy newspaper. Dermatologist. Pick up boots at shoe repair. Coffee. 3 train. Read newspaper. See photo of U.S. soldier in Europe showing off an M16 rifle to a girl in Poland, who’s holding rifle, mock firing, all as part of a promotional tour by military. Wonder about the image. Weary. Home. Laundry.
Among the things I will remember most about 2014 is studying for the New York bar examination. One Saturday last July I rode a No. 1 train headed downtown, my thoughts deep into an outline of criminal law, which is among the subjects tested.
A few stops into my ride a man boarded the car, announced that he was a musician, produced a flute and proceeded to play what he described as an original composition titled “The Quiet Storm.”
The title of the piece notwithstanding, I braced to be assaulted acoustically. All I wanted to do was to study. Now I would have to contend with this busker while I tried to memorize the material in my hands.
But the music was as billed. Quiet, soothing, lovely in a way, at least compared with what I anticipated. Over the summer, I took to using foam ear plugs to insulate me from the sounds of the city, which in my yearning to focus I had come to resent as an intrusion.
On the subway, the setup I resented most became companions who sat on benches across from each other. That demanded they speak loudly enough to be heard by each other and anyone nearby. I expected every place to be pin quiet, even, go figure, the streets of New York City in July.
The library was worse. I resented fellow students who rippled the silence with the force of their typing. I felt entitled to silence, which, of course, inverts what’s reasonable. It also shows how the bar exam or, for that matter, any undertaking that demands a mass of memorization, can consume us.
The man with the flute finished his piece and asked those of us around him for money. “Canadian coins are OK,” he offered as a made his way the length of the car. This I also largely ignored. Then he said something that caused me to gaze up from my notes. “I’m sorry everybody,” he said.
The apology snapped me from self-absorption. He had only played music and here he apologized. That seemed disproportionate to anything he had done. Of course, it can be nice to ride the train without being panhandled. Still, I wondered, what have we come to if someone has to apologize for playing a piece of music that qualifies as tolerably lovely?
I reached into my pocket and hoped I had a dollar. I didn’t, but I had a $5 bill, which I walked over to the musician and handed to him. “Thanks man,” he said, looking me in the eye.
“That was a nice piece, you played,” I replied. “Thank you.”
The man brightened. “It’s the first I played in six months,” he added. “I lost my son recently.”
My next thought was to ask him what had happened. But the train had arrived at my stop, the doors opened and I stepped out, instinctively, onto the platform. “Take care,” I said.
That was that. For a moment, I regretted not riding along so that we might continue the conversation. Then again, our exchange seemed enough to create a connection that will stay with me always.
