Graduation

[kate_schaefer]

My granddaughter graduated from eighth grade this evening. It seems precisely like eight years since I walked her to her first day of first grade, not like yesterday at all. I didn't tell her that I was remembering taking her to first grade as she graduated, as I don't think she would have been amused by it.

Comments

Graduation

[(Anonymous)]

Tim Kyger, being Anonymous again.

It seems like just yesterday that I was at *your* high school graduation.

I know where the unicorn is, BTW...

Re: Graduation

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure. That seems like yesterday: twenty-eight young women in white, each carrying a dozen red roses, marching into a big old stone church, singing song after school song (my school doesn't use the class songs any more, though they still sing the school hymn), surrounded by a school's worth of girls from kindergarten to eleventh grade, all wearing white uniforms required to be purchased for this one day of wear every year (it still amazes me: we had pale blue cotton summer uniforms, worn in the spring and fall without a hint of irony concerning their name, black watch plaid wool winter uniforms worn in the winter, and white cotton commencement uniforms, worn on commencement day by every student who was not actually commencing).

After the ceremony, we stood on the church steps and had our picture taken for the yearbook, then went back to the school and shook hands for an hour on the school lawn. The school was festooned with red and yellow roses, begged from all the gardens in Bexley by the juniors every year. My first- and second-year French teacher made a point of telling me how depressing she had found me as a student, now that I was leaving her orbit forever. I did not make a point of telling her how mediocre I had found her teaching and how grateful I was to the third-year French teacher that I had eventually learned to speak some French.

Somewhere I have some pictures of you and Robert from that day. I had expected it to be a lot of fun, and it ended up being pretty dreary, particularly for Robert. I don't remember for sure; had he gone back home by the time you graduated a few days later? I remember that day being a bit dreary, too, but that may just have been me. There is nothing quite like the awareness of having behaved badly to another human being to take the air out of an occasion.

One of the things I thought about while Amber graduated was that at her age, I had not yet met anyone who would end up being a lifelong friend, and that at the time I thought I just never would (I was mistaken; one of my elementary school teachers has become my lifelong friend, but at the time the age difference between us was so huge that she was an alien being, a wonderful, benevolent, friendly alien being, but certainly not a peer). By the time I'd graduated from high school, you and I were friends, and I'd met enough other people with similar enough interests to mine that lifelong loneliness seemed less inevitable. Now it seems loony that I ever thought that, but then it seemed impossible to find sympathetic people.

And here we are, 33 years later, you with a grown stepdaughter and two small children, me with two grown stepdaughters and three medium-size grandchildren, and still no commuter trips to the moon...

Re: Graduation

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

And what do you mean, you know where the unicorn is? Did they move it since I was last in Columbus?

Re: Graduation

[(Anonymous)]

Tim Kyger, doing is incredible acting debut as Anonymous.

Well, I know where the unicorn at the Columbus School for Girls' new location is. I also know where in Columbus the OTHER unicorn is.

As well as location of the Statue of the Unknown Boy Scout.

And people dare to mock the Midwest!