McKenzy is one of the valedictorians of the senior class of 2012 at Lebanon High School. This is the speech she gave to her peers and the school community on her graduation day.
J.R.R. Tolkien writes in his book The Hobbit, "There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something."
We have all looked for things we want over the past four years. For some of us, it has meant working hard in school and at jobs to pay for phones, cars, college and all the other things my mom -- I mean, our parents -- said we needed to save up for ourselves. A lot of us discovered that looking is very easy. In fact, my close personal friend Google helps me do a lot of looking. But the finding part was not always as simple. Luckily, we had help. Mr. Helland helped us find "x," Mr. Wong helped us find notes, and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Dykes helped us find... Well actually, I don't know what they helped us find. They just really wanted to make it into this speech. Anyway, most of us eventually found what we were looking for, but sometimes, what we found was a surprise. Mr. Tolkien ended the quote I began with by saying:
"You certainly usually find something if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after."
In the end, there are lots of things we are going to want in our lives, but they won't all come to us. I hope that this Class of 2012 keeps looking. There's no telling what we'll find!