The last high school graduation I went to was in the middle of post-vaccine Covid. We all sat in the stands of a football field, socially distanced, and watched socially distanced seniors give speeches in the sunshine.
Well, that guy’s little brudder has achieved the culmination of his senior year and it was our turn to celebrate his turn.
What surprised me is that we went back to the indoor arena where *I* graduated way back in the stone ages of 1991.
Wanna see where I sat? I sat down here:
34 years ago, that’s where I was sitting. I didn’t take the picture from where mom was sitting back then. I was about 30 feet to the right of where she was taking pictures of me (with a single-function camera, as was the style at the time).
An hour later, the floor looked like this:
That’s him. The good-looking kiddo in the middle.
They don’t play Pomp and Circumstance anymore. I feel ripped off.
They do still talk about how many students were there all four years and how many students were there all *TWELVE* years and the three speeches given by the three students with GPAs in the 4.8s and we had to sit through (*SHUDDER*) the Superintendent reading us “If“.
Could have been worse, I guess. Could have been “Invictus“.
Anyway, as I sat there, looking at a field of kids graduating in the arena where I graduated 34 years ago, I did some numbers in my head. Maribou has a couple of Canadian nieces who are in high school and will be graduating soon (for somewhat broad definitions of “soon”) and our dear friends who had the *FIRST* kid in our circle to graduate (talked about him here!) have a kiddo in middle school who will be graduating in about 5 or 6 years, and my best buddy has three girls, the eldest of whom is still in elementary, and so I could theoretically be talked into any/all of those…
But I also could reasonably be expected to merely show up at the afterparty and hand the kiddo an envelope and say “we’re proud of ya!” and lift a sandwich and leave without being asked to enjoy high school seniors reading speeches while their voices crack and superintendents reading poetry.
I don’t think I miss it yet. Maybe someday I will, of course… but not yet.
I suppose, if I’m lucky, I’ll be there in 20 years complaining to the nephews about the seats and explaining that I sat over there back in the previous century and, last time I was here, I took a picture with a phone.
Knock wood.
This weekend will have a handful of graduation open houses and we will be going to one of them and wishing the best to the graduate, lifting a sandwich, and leaving.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is the newfangled electronic billboard thingy that most assuredly was *NOT* there in 1991. Photo taken by the author.)
About to reverse progress down the peninsula to Williamsburg for my middle daughter’s graduation from William & Mary. (That’s 4 down and 2 to go, for those keeping score at home). We have digital tickets stored in Google wallet… which is a far cry from the way we did it at Notre Dame in, well, in the previous century. I guess these days there’s the University Graduation and then the College/Major Graduation the next day… so we’ll get the speechifying x2.
I booked us at the nearby Great Wolf Lodge (since all the cool hotels near campus were already booked months in advance)… so at least 10yo Son is stoked; as is the new son-in-law who also loves water parks (and is uncharacteristically sanguine compared to the family he married into). So that’s our weekend.
Bonus content to plug the Virginia Community College transfer program… our homeschooled children take their senior year at the local CC, then stay on for one more year to get Associate’s degree (which ‘launders’ their homeschool HS degree 🙂 ) and Virginia has a law that requires the 4-yr state schools to accept transfers (based on GPA) without any other screening/validation (again, great for homeschoolers). Basically instead of a ‘scholastic aptitude test’ they treat CC as scholastic aptitude proof. It also means that the kids graduate a year early and only have to pay 2-yrs of the expensive tuition. Pretty sweet set-up if you ask me. Pretty sweet even if you don’t ask me.
Congrats on the graduation.
Thank you.
Hey that’s 66.666666% done! Congrats!
And don’t fret too much about Great Wolf Lodge. We’ve been to that one a couple times and they have a great little convenience store thing right in the heart of it that sells 24 oz cans of beer. I needed a couple after the number those slides did on my dad joints.
Nice… beer and french fries for dinner tonight.
Wait, two graduation ceremonies in two days for the same person?
That’s… I can’t even imagine who would come up with that.
Seems cruel. Not like they talk directly about *my* daughter for 2hrs on each day.
Plus, after a couple weeks of 70 degree days, temps are spiking to 90s and the University graduation is outdoors in the stadium… probably staring into the sun in all directions.
Well, we had ours at the Air Force Academy Field House and there were all of these rules to get on the grounds of the Air Force Academy, rules for what kind of purses the ladies were allowed to bring, rules for what kind of items were allowed to be in the (transparent plastic!) purses (no food, no drinks except for sealed bottled water), and when we got in the building, they were selling concessions.
So I hope you can at least sneak in a sandwich.
They were doing this when I was at UMD (Go Terps!) because every graduating class has something like 10 to 12 thousand students. It’s impossible to have any sort of meaningful walking across the stage, etc. with that many people. So they have a big general ceremony plus each department would have a separate ceremony you could go to if you wanted something more intimate. I’m kind of a killjoy and find something annoyingly patronizing about these things so went to neither of mine, but a lot of people I know went to their department’s ceremony and skipped the big one.
Oh… yeah. I can see that.
When I was a kid out in the sticks, my school had about 25ish kids in my grade. That’s it. That was 3rd grade. 25 kids.
When I moved out to New York, my school had about 125 kids in each grade. Holy cow! By the time I got to high school, it had 500 students! I couldn’t believe how big the school was. It had *WINGS*.
When I moved out to Colorado, Air Academy high had about 300 students in my grade. We had multiple buildings! You had to walk outside to get from class to class, sometimes! And I overheard one of the kids talking about one of the girls moving here from Texas and saying something to the effect of “wow, that must suck… moving from a high school with 6000 kids to this little dinky one”.
There were about 300 kids, maybe a little more, there yesterday. AND THEY READ OFF EVERYBODY’S NAME.
We have a thousand plus in my kid’s graduating High School class.
I think we’re going to have them all walk across the stage. I’ll moan about it in two or three weeks.
Yeah, CU Boulder is doing this as well…the big ceremony with everyone but you only walk and get your diploma at the smaller “school of…” ceremony.
Someone at work recently sent a “motivational” email that included “If”, and frankly, why cancel anyone if we can’t cancel Kipling? Though I do have a soft spot for “My Boy Jack”.
I am a huge fan of Kipling, but, oh jeez… not “If”. Not “If”.
But I understand that it’s not like they could read “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” to the kids in the current year.