© Celine Sparks, 2023
Believe it or not, there are a limited number of tickets to this thing. But unlike the Taylor Swift concert where grown people are crying because they didn’t get a ticket, I was crying because I did. You’d think since you have to be special and all to get access, once you walk in the door, you’d at least be greeted with thousands of people pushing and shoving, blinding laser lights, and a screaming guitar or two.
It turns out you’re in a regular school auditorium, there are no spectacular light shows or even lighting dimmed enough to make your own light show with phone flashlights. But you’re trapped just the same. You’re in for 2.5 hours of this, and the only band that’s playing is the one piped in over the P.A. system with that solid gold hit, Pomp and Circumstance. I’m glad it fades out once the last blue-square-hat-topped kid has settled into a seat, because have you ever listened to the whole thing? It’s an arrangement of twenty-two notes. TWENTY-TWO! And it plays over and over and over and over until you have graduated from high school to the nursing home. Whoever wrote this thing, I wouldn’t be too pompous if those were the only circumstances I had to brag about.
Don’t be too hard on me for saying out loud what the rest of us are thinking. I do realize the significance of education. I am extremely proud of the accomplishment, and hopeful for the future of each young person who has achieved this milestone. It’s just the actual ceremony that kills me. This is two and a half hours of my life that I’ll never get back. I’m about to learn the first, middle, and last name, one at a time, of hundreds of people that are dressed exactly alike. And I’ve never understood who picked the outfits or how they ever got my son, who wouldn’t wear a necktie without a protest of a tragedy in three acts, to put on a dress. And then someone had the idea to charge an extra twelve dollars to put ropes around their neck that don’t do anything but just hang there. It’s an honor.
It’s almost asking too much of a parent who has already gone through excruciating birth pain, watched infomercials at 3 am while rocking a fevered toddler, risked her life in the passenger seat of the car where a child was learning to drive, and had science projects take over her refrigerator. And now this!
It would be better if they spoke in English at these things. There are a lot of summas and laudes, emeritus and tiramisu. Speaking of which, three people on the back row who may or may not be my offspring slipped out after their brother’s name was called to go to Besso’s Coffee Shop near the campus for their own private ceremony. My heart is divided on this one between “Shame on them” which is, I guess, where the decent parent lands herself, and “I wish I had thought of that first!”
In their defense, they had already heard the speaker, sang all the songs, and folded the programs in every kind of Origami pattern imaginable. It wasn’t like they were missing any of the required traditions.
And the graduation speaker left us with some great thoughts and words to live by. She really did. I have heard a multitude of speakers through the years, and some of those years went by in just one commencement. I have laughed and cried during the best speakers’ addresses, and just cried during some of the worst ones.
But here’s the deal. No matter how good, the words rarely have the impact the administration was hoping for, and here’s why. For four years (plus for some), these students have had to listen closely, take notes, and recall for a grade what a lecturer has said. And now, for the first time, there will be no quiz. None of this is going to show up again with a blank to fill in or a letter to circle. None of it. Who can really blame them for wandering minds at this point?
Mid-ceremony this year, my mind flashed back to when I walked across that same stage my son was now trekking. I was getting a master’s degree. My brain had been cram-packed with educational theories, teaching styles, learning styles, and I had completed a thesis on theatre intervention in the remediation of communication apprehension and reticence. You’d think I could do basic walking without getting my graduation gown sleeve caught on the stair railing.
But you’d think wrong.
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