It’s that time of year. Tents are going up, chairs and tables on heretofore empty patches of grass, and the air is electric with that peculiar blend of triumph tinged with melancholy – the cocktail of equal parts relief at leaving and panic at the future. It can only be graduation weekend.
God knows I remember it well. Not just in high school and college either. I remember it my first year at Vanderbilt, hearing songs that sounded like the end of the movie, wishing I’d had a little more of that vibe the year before, and mainly just being glad to have survived a philosophy seminar by the skin of my teeth with an incomplete. Beginning of the end, if I’d realized it, but I didn’t. And then, there was the graduation feel of leaving DC, with music on the iPod that evoked actual days in a gown and a mortarboard to drive home the point that I was about to leave the East Coast for good.
Graduation really is the regeneration moment. You go away and reappear elsewhere as somebody new, and as exciting a prospect as that is, it’s colored by the sadness that the person you’ve been for the last four (or seven) years isn’t going to be there anymore. And you find yourself wandering around campus, with the fug of honeysuckle or jasmine in the air, and sometimes time rolls back and you see yourself there that first week, looking at it all as if for the first time. And you mourn the things that you never got around to doing, and the people you never got to meet, and the person you’re not going to be anymore.
And then, you dump the mortarboard and unzip the polyester chrysalis, and emerge into the next stage of the real world. Onward and upward.