In June, we wrote about a black bear who lumbered across Guilderland. The bear appeared to be enjoying his suburban ramble, dipping in backyard pools, eating off grills, and visiting the school and the library.

A state wildlife manager told us the bear was probably a 2-year-old. Cubs stay with their mothers, he explained, until the spring of their second year. “They get kicked out for breeding. Some will find a mate,” he said. This bear was heading west, looking for its own territory.

Since we wrote the bear story at the same time we were in the midst of covering local high school graduation ceremonies, it struck us that it would be easier to grow up as a bear than a human. Kids, like cubs, leave their homes. They, too, have to find their own way and establish their own, new territory.

But, unlike bears, who are motivated mainly by putting on calories and mating, as the biologist said, humans have a far more complex challenge in deciding where they will go and who they will be.

Next week, we will run in The Enterprise excerpts from a just-published book by Gerard A. Finin, a Rensselaerville native, about Dr. Anna Perkins. She died a quarter of a century ago, in 1993, but is still remembered as a Hilltown icon, a pioneering female doctor. Finin had been one of her patients.

Perkins was raised by a patrician Boston family but chose a life of service rather than high society. The path she followed was not one that would have been easily predicted by either her station in life or her gender. A girl born at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century would have been expected to marry, presumably into a wealthy family, and raise children.

Perkins did neither. She became a revered country doctor, making house calls by jeep, or foot, or sleigh and seeing patients in the modest Westerlo home where she lived and practiced medicine. When times were tough, she’d take goods in lieu of her modest fees. She did this until the year she died, at the age of 93.

How did she find her path, to establish the Helderberg Hilltown territory as hers? In her own words: “I wanted to be a missionary, then a nurse, then a doctor. You start out wanting to do a good and noble thing, but you don’t know whether you’re fitted for it or not until you try. And you can’t try everything.”

Perhaps she was influenced by the philosophy of the president of Radcliffe College from which she graduated. Le Baron Briggs’s words as quoted by Finin: “Education has two divisions: education for knowledge and education for a profession. The aim of the first is to know; the second to do.”

Dr. Perkins both knew — she majored in chemistry at Radcliffe, was one of very few women to study medicine at Columbia, and completed her internship at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan — and did, serving Hilltown residents from her arrival there in 1928 until her death in 1993, for 65 years.

But what propelled her into a field where women were largely eschewed probably had much to do with the way she was raised. For we carry with us the lessons we learned at school, of course, but perhaps more central are the lessons we learn from those we love, from the people who raised us.

Finin writes of Elizabeth Ward Perkins, Dr. Perkins’s mother: “As the mother of four children, ‘Bessie’ dismissed contemporary assumptions about what women could and could not do in life. In her view, women should take up their ‘mental and physical capacity for adventure,’ and always be ‘daring to open new ways.’ Moreover, she believed all women should be ‘rooted with the lilacs in the soil of New England, live in the universe and weave the incredible future.’ This view of powerful women, unorthodox in the early 1900s, was fully conveyed to Elizabeth’s three daughters.”

The effect that parents have on their children comes home to us almost every time we write an obituary. Grieving children often recount what they have learned from their parents, how it has shaped them for the rest of their lives.

We wrote last month about Guilderland’s Edward Hanrahan, a master carpenter and a man of few words who taught his seven children by showing, rather than telling, them how to build — not just things but worthwhile lives.

“We learned from him that precision is really important,” said his daughter. “You measure twice and cut once.”

Sure, that’s a practical lesson but it also has a metaphoric meaning. What does it mean to be precise, to be the sort of a person who takes in a situation before acting, being sure it’s the right course?

When Marijo Dougherty, Altamont’s beloved village curator, died in February, her daughter told us,  “She exposed us constantly to the arts — to music and culture. It became part of us.”

That’s easy to understand and certainly a gift, loving something only humans produce that enrich not just the creator but the community as well.

Her daughter also told us, “We all got our sense of humor from her. She would light up any room she walked into — in any country, in any language. The light behind her eyes was infectious.”

Her daughters likened Marijo’s light to their grandmother’s — something not so much inherited — but learned and passed down from one generation to the next.

A mother bear might teach her cub to hibernate or to fish, which is useful and necessary for survival, but humans learn so much more from their parents. These ineffable qualities help us as we grow to define our own territories, each of us with our own place in the world.

And so, in this season of commencement — of beginnings — we urge a Janus-faced look, backwards as well as forward. We urge graduates, as each of you sets out to find your own path in life, to establish your own territory, to remember and honor the place from which you came.

For my sisters and me, who lost our father this year, we hold dear the words he loved. One of the poems he often read to us was Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” about a man who was enjoying chopping wood one April day, his muscles rocking soft and smooth and moist with vernal heat. But when two tramps came out of the woods from sleeping God knows where last night, he saw their right was need where his was love; they wanted to chop wood for pay.

My daughter read that poem at my father’s grave. My sister printed the final verse for us to live by:

Only where love and need are one

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the job ever really done

For heaven and the future’s sake.
 

— Melissa Hale-Spencer