Boys and men

I'm waiting for my mother and my aunt right now. I forget sometimes how long it takes those ladies to get ready to leave the house for any reason, any reason at all. The upside is that I thought I wouldn't have time to write today, but here I am. I could crank out a whole essay in the time it takes them to get ready to go out for dinner, with time left over to copy edit. And that's how meta it gets around here. I can write about writing, and I can write about not having time to write, EVEN AS I AM WRITING. Meta.

*****

My mother and aunt live in Philadelphia. They came on Wednesday night, for my son's high school graduation, which happened on Thursday morning, at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington DC. 329 kids were high school seniors on Thursday morning, and now they're high school graduates.

I graduated from high school at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, a venue not unlike Constitution Hall. Our school was the only school in the city privileged to graduate there. Constitution Hall, on the other hand, is normally a serious concert venue, but it turns into a veritable graduation factory in June. The next class and their families were already streaming in as we edged our way out, barely moving on the jam-packed narrow sidewalk on D Street. Happy graduates and little children and parents and friends and elderly relatives with wheelchairs and canes in a claustrophobic crush of lunch-seeking people, and then finally the crowds thinned as we walked toward the parking garage on G Street. I needed a sweater, even in a dense crowd on a June morning in Washington DC.

This weather. What the hell?

*****
The graduation ceremony was lovely; just over two hours long, with funny remarks from the senior class president and a very moving farewell speech from the principal. I haven't been our principal's biggest fan. She's fine, I don't dislike her or anything. But she has always seemed to me the exemplar of a type that I call Administrator-Princesses. And I call them that because I'm a jerk and a smart-ass, and I have no idea what I'm talking about.

As you'd expect, she called out several of the graduates for outstanding achievements of one kind or another (including one of my son's swim teammates, who will study and swim at the U.S. Naval Academy). But she also gave heartfelt praise to several kids who struggled or made mistakes, but recovered and persevered and graduated by the skin of their teeth. Several kids had to work throughout the extended senior vacation to complete assignments or make up tests. One boy dropped out and then returned to finish, a year late. And one boy, as the principal put it, "took a very wrong turn" in his sophomore year, and made some very serious mistakes. With obvious emotion, she said that the day he came back and said that he wanted to turn his life around and finish high school "was one of the happiest days in my career as an educator," surpassed only by this day, when she got to see him walk down an aisle in a cap and gown. In every example, she made every listener feel the importance and the value of every single young person, some weighed down with medals and honor cords and stoles, and some with cap and gown and no accessories other than their beautiful smiles. 

Not a dry eye, I tell you. And so don't listen to me when I dismiss people with my snide little names and funny funny categories. I'm a jerk; and most of the time, I don't know what I'm talking about.

*****
The next day, my eighth grader graduated from middle school, and so we did the whole thing again, on a slightly smaller scale. He received a President's Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, signed by Donald J. Trump and Betsy DeVos. Well, the certificate with its shiny seal is nice. 

Anyway, the eighth grade class adviser gave a funny speech about how the kids entered middle school as sixth graders, making play cakes with EZ Bake Ovens, and then advanced to baking actual edible cakes with store-bought mix, and then developed advanced baking skills, crafting homemade cakes from real ingredients. It was a good metaphor.

It might have been better had he avoided the phrase "master bakers" in a room full of eighth graders.

Know your audience, is all.

*****

So that which I have both dreaded and looked forward to is over. Graduations, Confirmation, last concerts, last games, last high school swim meets--all over for now. One more child will enter high school in the fall, and we'll do the whole thing over again. For now, we'll have our usual summer of summer swim meets and Friday night pasta parties. The long years of school and the short weeks of summer and the games and concerts and birthdays and college applications all go by very fast.

*****
It's Monday now, the first day of what we call "real summer" around here, because school is well and truly out, and spring sports are finished, and the pool is open from noon to 9 everyday. And the weather is finally hot, or at least warm. My son will turn 18 tomorrow, and he received his Selective Service registration card today. No time wasted, and no time to think about the implications of that little paper card with his name and address and date of birth. For now, we're all safe at home in the summer. But just like high school, nothing lasts forever.