Pomp and Circumstance

One minute, you are  leaving your son off at nursery school and he's crying for you to come back.

(Okay, he never cried for me to come back.)

And the next, you are sitting on a field with 2400 other parents, watching your son receive his degree.

The day began early and I knew he was excited because when we got there before 8:00 a.m., he was already in his cap and gown and ready to go.

The stage is set and ready to receive 1200 degree candidates, including doctorals and masters.  The engineering school is the largest constituency at the university.  The sun is shining and the morning is scrubbed clean with white chairs and red programs anticipating the ceremony. The procession is led by bagpipers, who always lend a thrilling gravity to a ritual, and ended with the colorful robes of the faculty processing onto the stage and taking their places amidst the color guards, the mace, and the bunting.

Soon the seats of white are filled with hooded robes bearing the colors of their schools and the thrilling punctuation of a the dress uniform of an officer candidate. So Top Gun!

Finally, after  many years of hard work, studying, exams, projects, and lots of frat parties, and several hours in the hot sun, MM receives his diploma, shakes the President's hand, and emerges with a B.S. in mechanical engineering.

We could not be prouder. 

I remember years and years ago, watching him sitting on the floor of the den in our house in Memphis. He'd gotten a Legos - or Knex? - roller coaster kit for Christmas. The box must have contained 5000 yellow, white, and red interlocking pieces.  Soon the wooden floor was littered with the multicolored pieces and I wondered if he'd ever get it together.  He sat on that floor for the entire vacation and little by little the coaster grew and grew until complete. It stayed in the den and was shown to all visitors until the following Christmas. 

I don't want to sound like a mom, but I am,  so why not - I knew then that he'd be a mechanical engineer.

I  look a little wan here, but it is only the sun in my eyes.  I cannot express how happy and thrilled I am to have seen two of my children successfully complete fine colleges. I do not take for granted the privilege of being present at the the threshold moments in my children's lives.

The mantle of college performance  is now transferred to The Teen, who must uphold her siblings' fine accomplishments.  

And don't for a minute think she cares - she is the most free thinking and easy going of my children and she will do whatever she wants - and do it fine.

 

The pride of Sigma Epsilon - they could be students anywhere, anytime, in this century or last. The romance of the cap and gown, the youthful glow, the manliness, the casual demeanor of the gifted and privileged.

Father and son walking back together;  sharing the accomplishment, worked hard for by both.



After the graduation, the school held a barbecue for all the families. In the midst of the chatter and hugs and exclamations, a young woman was standing with her friends and sobbing and laughing, wiping tears from her face as she said good bye to her best friends.

My daughter and I noticed it, it as hard not to notice a young woman with tears streaming down her face, alternately laughing and crying and hanging onto her friend's hand.

The intensity thrust me back into my college years, and the memories of the intense friendships, the studying of poetry and literature and philosophy, the all nighters, the endless papers, the dawn breakfasts at the diner, the getting by on a few dollars a week, and the music playing all the time, the music that was the soundtrack for our lives, and the demonstrations, the broken hearts, the whirlwind romances, the sleeping around, the stolen boyfriends, the late nights at the Rat, the endless packs of cigarettes and  coffee and beers, the hall parties, the disco dances, and lying out on the mall in the sun, pretending to study while keeping an eye on the latest crush walking to class.

And I remember the friends walking across the meadow in the early morning after a late night call that a father had died. And the friends who drank their way through their parents' divorces and their chances of going to med school, who crashed cars into trees, and hit their heads against walls and were taken out in stretchers, of girls who expressed their freedom by sleeping with everyone's boyfriends, of boys whose hearts were crushed by girls who didn't notice them and girls who were hopelessly in love with boys whose tastes ran to men, with those whose siblings were lost on drugs, whose mothers were dying of hereditary diseases that hung over their own heads, of boys who punched holes of Irish tempers into walls, young men and women who struggled with their sexuality and their money or lack of money,  with their hopes for the future and their fear of the future, and their desire to be something, anything, more than what they saw in the world outside the campus walls.

Was there ever a time more heady than college?

 And while I was waxing lyrical and sentimentally and asking all my son and his friends if they were sad to be going, if they'd miss their academic years, if they wished for more time in the sun,  with the books, and long afternoons with girls, and frat nights, and  beer and barbecues, and bike rides in the fall and sledding down the hills, my son, as usual, had a much simpler and clearer reaction,  that simply of

thumbs up, and

JOY.