One Moment

Graduation Day

In late June, my sister Sashie and I traveled back to our hometown deep in the farmy lands of upstate New York for our nephew’s high school graduation. When the daisy arches were lifted over the heads of the Seniors in their caps and gowns and the band played Pomp and Circumstance, I was aware again how much our traditions and rituals ground us.

It has been years since my high school graduation and yet, that day, it seemed as if, in my heart at least, very little time had passed. I felt the thrill of it: the long white robe, the crazy hat that flattened the already fragile poof in my hair, the wild, daisy-festooned arches over my head, the stirring notes of the processional, and the sense that something hugely important was taking place in my heretofore, quiet life.

I was seventeen that afternoon in June, had never seen an ocean or Paris, never seriously kissed a boy, never knew that I would come to love the arrangement of words on a page, had never cooked with real garlic, didn’t even have my license yet. But I knew, sitting up there on the stage, that a strange new landscape was taking form, and all that was comfortable and familiar was fading the way my vision had blurred in sixth grade and nothing was ever quite the same.

Mostly I was apprehensive about the beginnings, sad about the endings, homesick already for those seventeen growing-up years, for my friends, my house, my street, my town, my family. I always joked with my sister that just as I was getting the hang of it in high school, it was over. And that has been a recurrent theme: getting the hang of a job or a house or a city or a marriage, and then sometimes long before I was ready, it was over.

So when the Senior Class tossed their mortarboards up into the air and the applause swept them to their feet, a beginning and an ending merged in one moment. We all bore witness to it. We all remembered.