When It's Done

I got drafted into being a part of graduation yesterday. I helped with "the middle" of the massive class, helping them robe up, file in, stand up, file down, and sit down at the right times.  Mostly, I think it went as well as anything involving more than 350 very excited people can.  I wasn't in the spectator stands or on the field, so I am not exactly sure about the precision with which we carried it off, but I think it was good.  If not, they have their diplomas and they were happy, and that's all that really matters ultimately.  They behaved well, carried themselves with grace and dignity, and we were out of there before midnight.  All in all, not a bad evening.

Graduation is such a mixed time for me.  I am so proud to see all my chickadees fly, see all those bright blue robes flapping in joy when it's all done, but especially right now, I was also sad to know that it's an ending.  Of course, I'll still keep in touch in some ways with some of them, and that's as it should be.  They go on to other things.  They shed us, and that's they way it's supposed to be.  We are the shell the nautilus outgrows, the nest they perch on the rim of for a brief moment before flying away.

Sitting behind them as they stood up and turned their tassels, I watched as the inevitable downpour of hats began.  Because I was so close, I had to fend off a couple, but I just laughed as they fell, as the new graduates scrambled to find a cap, any cap, and dashed down the stadium seats to the field where the throng of family and friends awaited.  For a few moments, I just sat there in the horrible black robe they make us wear every year and watched them go.

Then, suddenly, I just didn't want to be there anymore.  I'd been at school, I realized, since 7:30 that morning.  I'd been at school, in fact, putting in 12-hour days almost 5 days out of every week.  And along with the sense of happiness and completion that came from seeing every single one of mine walk that line and get what they had worked so hard and so long for, there was also a terrible sense of tiredness and emptiness.

I suppose somebody is going to say that it isn't appropriate for me to have had that feeling.  Perhaps I should have been all joy and sweetness and light and sugar puffs, but it was real, and I did have it, whether it was wrong of me or okay.  So it wasn't that I wasn't full of joy for them.  I was.  Very much.  It's just that at the same time, I was suddenly somehow out-of-place for me.

I got up and made my way down.  I hugged a few necks, made some conversation with those I saw, but mostly, I had only one real destination, the little PT Cruiser waiting on me, already parked nose-out in the back lot.  This was a moment for families and friends as people were swept into embraces and photographs were taken.  I, being neither of these, did not belong.  I was like the old brick building standing silent looking down on the field.  We had done our part,  had served our ordained purposes, delivered up our portions of the sacrifice, and now it was time for others to take it from there.

As I crossed the field, I unzipped the black robe.  As I climbed the bleachers on the other side, I pulled it from me.  I was no longer anything that was official, anything that mattered at all.  I was just a tall woman in a black dress walking.  The revelry on the field continued.  The happy noise of it followed me across the dark parking lot through the courtyard.  I tossed the wadded up robe in the backseat of my car and cut through town seeking the interstate where I could find speed.  When it's done, it's done.