3 Years, 3 Graduations, 3 Different Worlds

 

As a parent, college graduation comes with moments of pride paired with angst.

Pride in their big picture accomplishments, angst over the logistics.

Pride over this rite of passage, angst over making sure "everyone is happy.”

Leading up to graduation the student is finishing senior week, long days and nights of papers and parties, worries about packing up, sadness about leaving school, fraught about their next move, already missing their friends, unsure what to make of the fact that everyone keeps telling them these are the best days of their lives.

Eons ago in 2019 we went to Philadelphia with the usual graduation weekend challenges: finding a centrally located hotel, landing dinner reservations at the sought-after restaurants, transportation for the grandparents.

In 2020 we were spared the pleasure and the pain when it was canceled due to the emergence of Covid. A letter from the Dean stated in stark terms that they are canceling graduation and will “celebrate these seniors at a later date.” This was a gut punch at the time, it improved with age.

Our 2022 graduation felt normal with a hint of Covid sprinkled in. Worried about the logistics but the coronavirus still hung in the air like the remnants of a bad sneeze. Does the restaurant have outdoor seating, should the kids get near the grandparents, is Tipitinas really a good idea? 

It was on our minds, just not top of it. Maybe that’s why many of us returned from New Orleans with head-cold cases of the virus, typical of this vintage.

This year also brought a make-up graduation for the cancelled 2020 version, in what they appropriately called the “Comeback Commencement.” It felt a lot like a timely graduation with all the caps and gowns, pomp and circumstances of the original, but it was different. It was better...for the graduates.

The Comeback Commencement was equal parts reunion and victory lap. It was more comeback than prepare to check out.

There was still the need to land hotel rooms and dinner reservations, but the campus was emptier and more manageable. The kids were happy to be there, not stressed about leaving. They hadn’t spent the previous week staying up all night partying, they’d spent it working at their jobs, collecting a paycheck, making their own transportation plans.

At the make-up graduation they were enjoying this moment that had been taken away, made better by the distance and the delayed gratification. The comeback graduates better understood the need to enjoy the moment because on the other side of Sunday their adult lives were waiting, with projects to finish and emails to return.

The difference in perspective was laid bare by the calls and texts leading up to the two commencements. I heard excitement from one daughter and dread from the other. One felt like a commencement, the other like a termination:

“I’m so excited to see my friends” vs. “I’m so sad to say goodbye to everyone.”

“I can’t wait to get a Zingermans sandwich” vs. “I can’t believe it’s the last time I’ll have pizza at the Boot”

“I'm gonna walk through the Diag without having to go to the library” vs. “I just had my last walk in Audubon Park.”

In two years our daughter went from graduation apprehension to carefree commencement.

A suggestion: Let Seniors leave campus after final exams, get on with their lives and then bring them back for graduation. Let their lives commence before commencement.

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile you could miss it." F. Bueller

Across the Stage

“He doesn’t fit any more,” my wife said, just weeks before our eldest child's college graduation.

“Oh Boy,” she's getting emotional, I thought.

When he was turning two years old we bought him a room set with a pair of trundle beds.  His sister was on the way and we needed the crib.

Now twenty years later a new bed was moving in.

"Why now?" I asked, not seeing the need for anything new in the child’s bedroom which is hermetically sealed between visits. 

"Are we renting it out?

"He doesn't fit in the bed," my wife claimed.  

"His feet hang over the edge."

"He doesn't need to fit in that room anymore," I said, wishing immediately that I could take it back.

There are books and blogs and blather on the moment your child exits the house for college.  We'd been warned about the earthquake of the emptying house.  But now with an empty nest I realize when they go to college they don't go anywhere.  

The calls, the Facetimes, the pictures.  Through technology I feel as if I know more about them now than I did during the 100-Years War that was high school when they lived in my house.  It was a series of Spy versus Spy operations where they hid the alcohol, changed their Instagram names, and spoke in tongues as if they were the world's first teenagers.

Later that day I heard my son’s voice coming through my wife's phone, so I came running.  He was in between classes, all I could see on the Facetime was sky, then grass, then sky, as he swung the phone to and fro.  She told him that the trundles were going and the next time he is in town he’ll have a real “big boy” bed.  

He stammered.

I knew it.  The emotion was getting to him.  Just weeks from college graduation and here she is cutting this final link to his childhood.

He caught himself and said, “You may want to check the trundle.”

One trundle bed had a mattress inside of it, but for some reason we never got a second one.

“What’s in there?” she asked.

I sprinted to his room, sure to discover some treasure, maybe a high school diary or a note to his parents, or things he saved that I never knew.

I yanked open the trundle to a cacophony of clanging bottles.  A secret stash of the world’s worst tasting vodka:  Berri Acai, Orange Sherbert, Absolut Lime, Stoli Razberi.

They had used my son's second trundle bed as a bottle depository during high school for illicit empties?

The drawer where my son’s small fingers first climbed into bed, where we read him his first books, where he went from diapers to underwear, was filled with flavor combinations that could only appeal to the palate of a high school junior.

Those sticky marks on the little wood handles weren't childhood residue, the remnants of a lollipop gone awry, but the spillage of a shot of Peach Stoli?

What you know when they go off to college is that they will return at some predictable interval for holidays and other regularly scheduled events.

But without the school calendar to dictate what can we expect?

At what point do the tables turn and we are visiting him because we have the free time and his store of precious PTO days doesn’t allow?

Like a dial that keeps clicking forward the channel is now tuned to post-collegiate life, a line-up we do not recognize.

There were few tears this weekend, lots of planning and logistics, but then on the field after the ceremony he ran into one of his first friends from the first week of school.  They hugged and said goodbye.  

She is spending the summer in Philadelphia, he is off to New York.

"When will I see you again," she asked.  He stood dumbstruck.  

"I don't know."

That's the difference between school and post-school.  The calendar is still the calendar, there is still New Years, 4th of July and Thanksgiving.  But where will you be at those times?  What do you do in a world where the Library, the coffee shop, or a living room couch are no longer logical landmarks to find your friends?

I have written him letters at every imaginable rite of passage worrying that my days of fatherhood were numbered.  Now as he walks across another stage I have no list of things to tell him.  Except to find those times and those places for those people.  The ones who were always just there, the ones you didn't need to seek out because you'd bump into them without trying.  In a Post-Collegiate world that's the biggest transition, you need to try harder to keep those people close.

So we've got a big comfy bed if you need it.  

And it doesn't rattle.