Mays advises graduates to use song, imagination 

He recalled riding with his father in his Rainbo bread delivery truck, asking if the puffy clouds in the sky were created in the Rainbo plant in Commerce City. His father’s response to his then eight-year-old son, “You have some imagination on you, Jovan,” was echoed again by his third grade teacher, Miss Chambers, when Mays asked her what kind of tree “poetree” was. 

 

When adults in his life made this comment, he thought, “Don't we all have an imagination?” 

 

“If anything, our imaginations are the greatest restoration tools we have. They make magic out of the meaningless dreams of decay, and mosaics out of the madness. I imagine when you find your inner third-grader, let the weird spill all over the table and you will make a story out of the splatter,” Mays said. 

 

He shared an observation about the healing and comforting properties of a healthy, childlike imagination after his seven-year-old nephew lost his grandmother to Covid-19. 

 

“One night, my nephew excused himself from the dinner table and took his non-working Apple headphones with him. After a few minutes I went to look for him. In the back room, he had turned the AirPods into a connection device where he could speak to his Granny. And he was laughing, and she was responding, and he was laughing,” Mays said. 

 

He also extolled the virtues of music to heal some of the ills of society. He recounted the story of 33-year-old teacher Marta Rivera Alanis, who protected her preschool students from a shootout between rival drug cartels in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2011, by singing a song from the television show “Barney & Friends,” while they lay on the ground below bullets flying through the windows. 

 

Mays asked the audience to consider who will protect each person’s inner third grader. 

 

“Who’s going to pull us down to the ground below the windows as the shrapnel screams above our heads? Perhaps, music is the most powerful force we know,” he said. “I marveled at my grandma’s enchantment. She would stand in the kitchen making breakfast and whistle a canary’s song. Within seconds, a congregation of songbirds would line up at her windowsill. From that day on, I was certain that my grandma is the reason that I was born on Earth Day and if magic isn’t real, then I can’t explain all the things that I’ve seen.”