Graduation Day

Graduation day.  People write songs about it.  They write speeches for it.  It is a day for celebrating and it is also generally a long rather dull exercise filled with speeches by people who feel obligated to be witty and wise while speaking over poor pa systems.

I found myself listening to Pomp and Circumstance and nostalgia washed over me.  I played that for the very first time when I was in eighth grade.  Oboes were in short supply in Springfield, so I played in every graduation from then until my senior year.  Senior year my parents moved to another town where they did not play Pomp and Circumstance!

I watched the graduating high school seniors marching in, two by two and tears filled my eyes.  Today my granddaughter graduated!  Soon she will be eighteen years old and it will have been exactly eighteen years since I picked up that tiny thirteen-inch long baby who weighed less than three pounds and informed her mother she was a girl!  Then I turned to the tiny baby in my hands and welcomed her into the world.

Not many grandmothers have such an amazing experience.  

They displayed each student's senior picture along with one from when they were much younger.  I was touched that the picture she chose was one I took of her sitting at my piano when she was only three.

She has always been kind, fun loving, empathetic and intelligent, but now she will take all these blessings and do something with them.  I don’t know what it will end up being, but I know that whatever it is, I will always be so proud of her.