Nothing Gold Can Stay

Lessons from graduation, the garden, and Robert Frost. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

MY NIECE GRADUATED from the University of Rochester a few days ago. We were on hand for the festivities, so we heard the word “Meliora” about a thousand times. It’s Latin for “ever better”—the university’s exhausting and intimidating motto.

Ever Better? Really?

These kids just finished four years of covid-deranged study. Can’t they take a break from relentless self-improvement, and just breathe for a minute?

Nature wasn’t letting them off the hook either, as everything was in bud and flower, growing ever more meliora by the minute. Certain fortunate 22-year olds (like my niece) are indeed irrepressible shoots ready to burst forth into the most productive time of their lives.

But as I looked on on the quadrangle at U of R, the poet Robert Frost was whispering in my ear, as he often does in spring.

My dad was a great memorizer of poems, erupting with them when the circumstances called for pointed versification. Once, when we were driving out west on vacation, and young…