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Every graduation ceremony has same awkward dynamic
(by Jeff Fister - June 25, 2008)
‘Welcome to the first day of the rest of your lives!”
I was in a crowded bathroom in the gym building at the University of Missouri-St. Louis when I heard a loud young voice proclaim this.
The voice was familiar. Several people laughed at the slightly cynical tone.
The bathroom was filled with young men in caps and gowns, adjusting their ties, combing their hair, getting ready to join the 600 or so people about to graduate.
The voice was that of my oldest son, ready to join the group as a newly minted degree-holder.
A few weeks later, I was in our own bathroom at home. I grabbed a tie from my closet and tossed it to my eighth-grade son. He was hurriedly dressing for his own graduation from Cathedral Basilica grade school. “Dad can you tie my tie?”
This was a familiar ritual with my sons. There was no time to show him how to tie it, so I stood behind him and wrapped the tie around his neck as if I was tying my own. Later, during the solemn ceremony at the Basilica (the “new Cathedral” on Lindell Boulevard), I noticed that his collar was open and the tie still hung loosely below his neck. So much for fatherly guidance.
This was the first time we had two kids graduate in the same season, and it gave me a chance to compare two entirely different rites of passage.
The UMSL ceremony was impressive, filled with distinguished professors and a long parade of young men and women eagerly shaking hands with the chancellor and clutching their new tickets to adulthood.
It was capped off by a short, poignant and at times humorous address by Martin Duggan. Duggan is a 78-year-old veteran of St. Louis journalism who referees the assortment of curmudgeons who debate the politics of the day on the local television show Donnybrook.
During the ceremony, I scanned the large group of graduates and watched my son, suddenly looking so grown up. I remembered in February when he gave me an invoice from school to pay for some of the graduation expenses. “Do you really want me to ‘walk’?” he asked. “It’s no big deal.” Oh yes it is, I thought, and that was the quickest check I’d ever written for any of my kids’ education. It made me think of the old Woody Allen line: 90 percent of life is showing up.
Graduating from grade school doesn’t have quite the import of graduating from college, but it’s an important milestone. Unlike cultures of old, which had recognizable initiations for those leaving childhood — like, say, wild deer hunts — this is about all we have. We dress up gawky pre-adolescents in caps and gowns and then they become gawky adolescents.
My son and his classmates did a good job “walking the walk” for the ceremony at the Cathedral, dutifully listening to the principal and pastor impart their wisdom, filing in and out, smiling for the cameras. Although I could almost feel them squirming underneath their gowns; when will this be over? When can we get something to eat?
I really don’t remember much about my own graduations. I do recall a speaker in high school saying that “these are the best years of your life” and I thought: If that’s the case, what is there to look forward to? And the only thing I really remember from my college graduation at the old Arena was when my dad, who was a professor at St. Louis University, walked over and shook my hand when I was walking down from the stage.
Graduations are like other big ceremonies in life: They’re really for other people, not for the participants. Sorry — that sounds just like another platitude you might hear in the thousands of commencement speeches that take place every summer.
You know, like it’s the first day of the rest of your life.
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