Here's to the graduate!

Ben is only five years old and yet he is already a graduate. A graduate of preschool - but still a graduate. In the weird karmic circularity of life, we attended a full graduation ceremony for him - complete with songs, speeches and diplomas - almost twenty five years to the day that I graduated from high school. I don't really know which I'm having a more difficult time wrapping my head around: the fact that my son, who only moments ago was a screaming infant in diapers, is heading off to a real 9 to 3 classroom this fall, or that it has been a quarter of a century since I left one.

Wow, 25 years. I remember that unusually hot June night, the white eyelet lace dress I wore, the parents, grandparents, friends, shuffling in the bleachers as we paraded across the shiny wood gymnasium floor to our folding metal seats. Pomp and Circumstance blaring out over the speaker system. I had every intention of being a good little graduate, listening politely to the principal and school board chairwoman say their bit, nod encouragingly to the valedictorian - a triple threat: good grades, good athlete, and popular - and then receive my diploma. I had not expected the girl beside me to take sick from a mixture of too much heat and too many pre-ceremony Bacardi and cokes. I remember the piercing scrrreeeechhh of our folding metal chairs scraping across the floor. The flustered pause of the valedictorian - a nice person, can't remember her name but I'm sure she's never forgiven me for ruining her moment - as I half dragged the gagging girl out of the gym. The amount of echo created by the sound of one young woman vomiting in an empty locker room.

Ahh ...... the memories. And now here I am again, twenty five years older, wiser, with a bigger ass and more gray hair, sitting once again in a folding metal seat, watching a little boy, my little boy, walk forward to receive his diploma.

I swear I did nothing this time to disrupt the ceremony. A few maternal tears make no noise at all.