I received a remark regarding my last entry about Son’s graduation saying that my ending seemed like a put-down and I felt badly about that and wanted to address it. I could not be more thrilled with my children’s accomplishments and I have written in previous entries that Son worked over 40 hours a week managing a restaurant in addition to taking a full course load. He paid his own tuition senior year. He made the Dean’s list more than once. The fact that my phone calls always woke him up, day or night, prompting him to groggily assure me he had just been studying became a running joke between us. At his graduation dinner he made us all laugh with his sly comment and I played on it in my entry.
My goal with this blog is to entertain my readers with experiences that may be reminiscent of their own, either as a parent or a child. Sinking into the sea of mothers bragging about their kids in print is not my idea of a good time as a journalist so my hand was forced here and I apologize. As penance, I am willing to receive a limited number of gushing, over-the-top descriptions of your prodigy’s most precious remark or achievement. I promise I will read them all. I won’t print them but I will read them.
This was a big graduation weekend and if I’m not mistaken I also detect the scent of hair gel and orchids, which can only mean prom season. I didn’t go to my prom and I think it was because I wound up unexpectedly graduating a semester early but there could be another reason I’m not recalling. You know what they say about the haze of that era: If you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there.
Proms and graduations, these are Catcher in the Rye moments in my book, milestones where we learn to wrestle with partings and make our own peace with the rhythm of endings and beginnings. I think of Holden Caulfield standing in the hallway of his dorm at Pencey Prep, about to leave and trying to get his goodbye. He couldn’t walk away from memories too valuable to let go so he had to make himself recall all the crappy things that annoyed him about living there. Standing alone in the hall he shouted, “Sleep tight, ya’ morons!” Then he could go.
In the folio that contains my high school diploma there is a poem given to me by a friend who graduated a year before me in a state that could only be considered Dazed and Confused. At the time, it spoke to the mire our generation was in as we watched friends go off to war and clouds of napalm billow on the cover of Life Magazine. Here are the words of advice given to me by that former graduate at my ceremony in 1972:
this is the
time of year for handshakes
and kisses on the cheek
when the conceited are outgoing
and the frightened are the meek
y’know ya can’t cash your paycheck
till the end of the week
here’s your diploma
less the taxes.
i’ll sign your
high school yearbook
“don’t forget me and good luck”
they’ll try to make you a secretary
even though you wanna drive a truck
y’know you can’t float on water
by pretending you’re a duck
here’s your reward
now go out and earn it.
i know
there will be times
when you will be depressed
they’ll take you aside
like they’ve done with all the rest
‘n tell you, the reason ya run a race,
kid,
is so that you can be the best
but you’ll win every time
if you try to lose
rejoice and dance upon their chest
you know there is no use.
Thirty-five years later we’re in a different war and the endings and beginnings keep coming. We do what we can to get the goodbye we need. After Son’s graduation dinner, I gave him one last lift to his apartment so he could finish packing his belongings after five years at school in another state. As we drove down the main street, a pedestrian walked in front of my car and I had to swerve to avoid him. Son shook his head with disdain. “That’s the thing about this place,” he said, pitiably, “the people don’t mind getting hit by cars.”
Okay, sleep tight now.