The Peaks, the Pomp and the Circumstances

My son graduated from high school last Saturday.

I have an older daughter, so in the weeks leading up to graduation, many parents considered me experienced. They asked me — how many guests do we get at the Baccalaureate? Do parents go to the awards ceremony? How long does graduation really go?

I didn’t know any of the answers. My older daughter didn’t get these things. She graduated in 2020 and lost all her rights to these rites of passage. Senior skip day? Skipped. Senior assassins? DOA. Guest limit for her graduation? Seven, the number of seats in our Suburban.

All pomp ruined by circumstances.

So I was new to all of this — all of these events marking this big deal. And I, as the cliche states, had not known what I was missing. When everything got canceled in that 2020 spring, I had taken the whole milestone as a loss, a giant write-down, not understanding the value of half of the line items I’d slashed.

I see the full value now. I see that there is so much sweet to cut the bitter of this kind of ending. That this time and its ceremonies and traditions are privileges, and that every event builds to a proper and necessary goodbye.

And watching my son in these last few weeks has made me realize: high school graduation is the first really iconic thing any one of us does, where, equipped with a readily-banking memory and a requisite number of years under our belts, we both have an archetypal experience and have the…