My Backyard

The graduation season is upon us.  My memory is that my graduations were more important to my parents than to me.  I think much of that feeling was generated by the fact that I was the first generation to graduate college.  In my parents generation many kids were fortunate to graduate high school.  In our children’s world they assumed as we did that they would go to college and graduate.  This Sunday our youngest child will graduate from Clark University. I intend to enjoy the day.

If you have never attended a Northeastern University graduation you have to get invited to one. The graduations, when I taught there, were held in the old Boston Garden. The undergraduates numbered in the thousands.  Every single student marched to the podium and was handed his or her diploma by the Dean of that college.  The ceremony is conducted with military precision. When you factored in the graduate students, the faculty, honorary degree recipients and staff there were six or seven thousand people on the garden floor. The guests, family and parents added another thirteen or fourteen thousand people to the mix. There was no air-conditioning. Remarkably, I know of no students who received the wrong diploma. Now that the new garden is air-conditioned, I am certain it is a cooler event.

In the ten years I was honored to serve on school committee in Attleboro, the high school graduation was the best day of the school committee year.  There is a tradition of committee members presenting diplomas to the graduating class. There is a tradition of holding the ceremony on the football field.  Four hundred or so kids graduate each year and they are your neighbors’ kids.  You do not know all of them but you feel like they are your kids.

If you are lucky enough to serve on school committee and your child is graduating you get to present the diploma to your child.  Of our four children only our daughter Alex graduated from Attleboro High and that ceremony is one of our shared, fond memories.

I suggested that from my point of view we should line the parents up on one end of the field and the graduates at the other end. When the name is called they approach and meet at center stage and the parents present the diploma to their child.  It would work for me and I know it would work for them.  Other members of the committee thought me to be a madman.  If logistics are an issue, I have contacts at Northeastern who would be glad to come to town and whip us into shape.

My sister and my wife graduated in the same class from Stonehill College.  I first met my wife-to-be in the last month of her senior year on a day I was visiting my sister.  We liked each other.  We dated in those last weeks of the school year.  She graduated and went home to Connecticut.

I was the family camera man at that graduation.  I had my dad’s super-eight camera.  I remember when the film came back my dad asking me who the pretty blond young woman is who showed up in so many of the frames.  I told him a friend of Trish.  I am blessed with how that graduation developed.

Until next time.