Windchimes

Pomp and Hercumstance

         Whew! I almost deleted this journal. I had previously used this space to try to jumpstart a paper, had the access restricted to "private," but planned on deleting the entry later. This is (if I were writing a paper, I'd use "constitutes" or some other fancy, polysyllabic, latinate word instead of "is," but it's gonna be a while before I write any more papers) the 100th entry (again, if I were writing a paper, I'd spell out 100th). The subject of this entry, however, is all about being finished writing papers for a while. And since I'm not writing a paper, I will start sentences with conjunctions. Like "but." But the subject of this entry (see sentence that precedes the last two sentence fragments). I wanted to save the 100th entry of this journal for writing about another milestone.

         Yesterday, my oldest daughter and I arrived at campus at a little after 8:00a.m. to line up with this semester's other graduates for our 9:00a.m. graduation ceremony. But let me start back in time a little before that. The night before last, my sister, my niece, my nephew and my Dad arrived in town. I warmed up frozen lasagne, cut up some strawberries, threw some bagged greens in a bowl with some bleu cheese crumbles and walnuts. Yeah, I didn't cook dinner for them, but I prepared some food and we all ate dinner together. When they got here, Daddy gave me a congrats grad card with a note that made me cry, talking about reaching a milestone that I'd passed up while reaching other milestones and affirming his conviction that, along with himself, my mother would be watching my daughter and I as we received our degrees. My sister handed me a card my six year old niece made with a decorative stamping kit and a small stainglass ornament she'd painted. After dinner, I made sure my sister would know how to get to the graduation site from their hotel (one of these days, I'd like to have a guestroom, or at least a comfortable place for a few guests to spend the night), Daddy played on the piano that used to be in his living room and is now in mine, and we all talked about my Dad's dad's old house, and my sister's lack of hesitation to go knock on the door of anywhere we or someone in our family used to live and ask the current residents for a tour.

And going back in time a little before the night before last....

I spent the day working on one final assignment...did a sorry job of it, but...like I told another professer to whom I'd turned in an another assignment on which I'd done a sorry job...double the major, double the senioritis. Point is (or my point is) I spent the morning and part of the afternoon in the cubicle where I've kept myself most of the year, the cubicle with a desk and desktop I had as a sort of necessity but quite a perk of the eclectic editor gig. Almost all the first-year writing teachers who have offices in the same suite where my cubicled-off corner is were there (is were, I'm gonna let that construction go). They were all giving final exams and/or grading papers, but since I won't be in the cubicle next year, and one of the other teachers won't be there next year, the rest of them had bought some parting/graduation/best wishes gifts. They are a sweet bunch of folks, and I will miss them, and they say they'll miss me, too. But we might get some chances to run into each other and chat every now and then in the future. The teacher who won't be there next year gave me a huge book full of Milosz' poems, and wrote a sweet note on the flyleaf. The others went in together and bought me gift cards for Starbucks and Barnes & Noble....coffee and books...said they wanted to feed a couple of my addictions. I don't want to take any more courses at the moment, but I don't want to leave, either. Those folks are part of the reason. I'll see them tomorrow, though. I'm going to go in to hopefully tie up all the loose ends having to do with the eclectic, finish up the daybook with a narrative on the process of publishing the thing, with appendices on how to go about doing other things thereunto associated, and see how much money is left in the eclectic budget. Shouldn't be much, but we need to make sure to use it all.
         Back to yesterday at a little after 8:00, kind of. We were supposed to be there no later than 8:00, but my daughter had stayed up the night before, waiting up for one of my sons, who drove in from Tennessee. He arrived at around 2:00a.m., having driven five or six hours after attending his girlfriend's graduation. (This is the son who spent a year in Baghdad. I haven't seen my other son since last weekend or so, but he and his fiancée are getting married in less than two weeks now. Maybe he was too busy with other things to make it to the grad ceremony. Maybe I'm making excuses for him to myself, but, heck, there's nothing else I can do at this point). I woke up for a few moments after I heard son #2 milling around in the hallway and said hi, good to see you, goodnight. I woke up in plenty of time to get ready to be where we were supposed to be by 8:00, but I should have waken Constance up sooner than I did, because I was obliged to tap my foot under my graduation cap and gown while waiting for my daughter to finish up her make-up. We dashed out the door at around 8:00. I drove while she finished her face. I guess the ceremony planners knew there would be late arrivals. They didn't really start lining us up until 15 minutes before the ceremony, so they could have told us to be there no later than 8:30, but then people like my daughter and I would have gotten there at 8:40...yeah, you get it.

         When I finally got there, many of my English-major classmates were already standing in the general area where the number on the card someone handed me informed me I should be. Patrick had a digital camera, and we all (except for Amanda...we couldn't find her and it was getting a little late by then) grouped for a group photo and just generally had a great time laughing and talking together. My daughter stood about three rows over, with some of her Psychology department classmates. I had thought about contacting the person in charge of arranging the line-up to see if Constance and I could sit together, and it might have been fun, but I think it was good to be around our classmates, too. As we marched in, I looked around for our family members and friends, but didn't see them at first. I wondered aloud to my neighbor if my husband would be arriving late. Sorry about that honey. When I looked around after arriving at my assigned chair, I saw my other daughter, the son who had made it, my husband, my parents-in-law, my dad, my sister, my niece, my nephew and my daughter's boyfriend all waving wildly at me. After the ceremony, I saw and talked to two other friends who came. One was a former girlfriend of my oldest son, the one who didn't make it. She's married now. She used to be a student at West Georgia and remarked how much the area had changed since then. Another was one of my camarades de classe who graduated with a B.A. in French in the summer of 2004. We went through so many classes together...and went to a local watering hole after taking our French phonetics and linguistics final. With another classmate, we stayed there for hours, conversing in French. She and I also spent a couple of weeks in France together in the summer of 2005, and my husband and I ran into her and her boyfriend while we were in Paris for a week last year. We finally got to see "La Cantatrice Chauve" at La Petite Huchette on that occasion, and went to a sidewalk cafe afterwards where Amanda (not the same Amanda who we couldn't find for the English photo) had seen something like 40 different Belgian beers advertised. Both friends got up really early to make it to the morning ceremony, driving in from different suburbs of Atlanta. My in-laws got up really early to drive from Columbus.

         The ceremony went pretty swiftly for one of these ceremonies, and the speaker was entertaining. Although Constance and I weren't sitting right next to each other as we had thought we might, the professor serving as the master of this ceremony, at one point, asked all the parents of graduates to stand. I don't think there were any other capped and gowned parents that stood up. As a side note, the lady handing degrees to the graduates as they approached the stage was an old friend of mine who knew me when I was pregnant with Constance.

         In the last novel I read as an assignment for an English course, the narrator, riding with the man she marries not long after, expresses a wish for an invention that bottled up moments so that you could uncork the bottle later and experience the moment all over again. If there were such a thing, I'd bottle up the moment when we moved our tassels from the right to the left side of our mortarboards. I started to cry then, and Constance later confessed that she did, as well. The only thing about the whole experience I might change is the fact that the program listed me as an English major, with a very tiny symbol that looked kind of like a cursive "F" by my name, repeated at the bottom of the page with the note "also French." I started as a French major, and added the English major two years into my studies, so it seems like "French" with a note that said "also English" would have been more appropriate. My name would have been the only one on that list, though. I guess I felt special enough without that.

My family, minus my oldest son but plus one of his former girlfriends and Constance's present boyfriend, gathered back at my house after the ceremony and the reception, then we all headed for the town square for lunch at one of the local restaurants. The town's annual "Mayfest" was in full swing, so we parked a couple of blocks away and walked by all the booths to the restaurant. My sister really liked the eatery, which is one of our family's favorites and one of Constance's former places of employment. There were thirteen of us all together, and I think it was a very lucky number. My sister bought some funnel cakes at one of the booths after we had lunch, to share with my niece and anyone else who wasn't too stuffed, then we walked over to the corner of the square from where we could hear a percussion ensemble. We watched the musicians and the people who couldn't resist dancing to the beat they provided, then we walked back to the parking lot of the town's cultural arts center and returned chez moi. I told Constance that it wasn 't really Mayfest or Cinco de Mayo, but the whole city of Carrollton partying because we had finally graduated. Yeah, I know. But I couldn't have been happier had that been the actual case.

I know I'm rambling, but I hesitate to close this window. I know I'll reminisce for a while, and I know I can always open it back up to edit if I want to, and I know I could even write more in other entries. But this is the (actual) hundredth entry in this journal. I've never made it to 100 entries in one of these journals. It's a milestone. Maybe I've dwelled on it long enough for now.