Things just feel a little different when school starts drawing to a close.

Even we grownups sense it, we for whom the late bell is but a memory. A memory too the collecting-up of textbooks after the year-long loan; the calling in of library volumes, with their endearing grade-school titles: Our Friend the Panda. Your Solar System. Young Teddy Roosevelt, Rough Rider of Destiny...

There is, at the school-year’s end, that delicious sense of closure. William Butler Yeats was asked once how he knew he was through tinkering with a poem and it was really finished. “It clicks shut,” is what he said. There is the same sense of finality about so many end-of-the-school-year rituals; a sense of the thing well and truly done, the case closed, the blackboard finally erased.

I went to two college commencements within the space of one weekend and came away marveling at both all that has changed in this old rite of passage, and all that has remained the same.

At the first one, the academic gowns the kids wore were made from goods of such cheesiness as to resemble that maddening kind of plastic wrap that doesn’t so much cling to as hover about the food it seeks to cover. They didn’t hang right. Their seams puckered. Their hems dipped and rose. And, in the breezy way of the times, many kids didn’t even bother zipping them. Several young men marched with tee shirts and boxers under their gowns. One young woman wore a dress, and her academic gown over the dress, and then a long ratty sweater over the gown.

A young friend attending this ceremony with me had recently endured a commencement of his own.

“You should have been at my graduation if you think this is informal,” he whispered as these other young graduates passed.

“They gave me a robe so short it looked like a dickey, and when the time came to actually hand us our diplomas, they just had us line up in a field, where a sort of lunch lady pulled them one by one from a file cabinet.”

Two days later, at the second college commencement, the gowns at least fit better, though these kids “customized” their outfits too, with feather boas, and fanciful armbands, and whimsical headgear in place of the traditional academic cap.

And the parents in this audience seemed to express themselves with a similar whimsy: A family from China stood and hooted when their daughter’s name was read. A family from Kenya did the same when their turn came.

And a family from Brooklyn who sat in front of us outdid them all. When our own graduate’s name was read, and we too exulted in our more staid New England way, the Brooklynites wheeled around. “Ya shoulda told us!” they boomed amiably. “We’da helped ya yell!”

This ceremony was over three hours long. For over three sweltering hours we all sat, alternately re-reading our sweat-soaked programs and fanning ourselves with them. I studied the name of every graduate, departing trustee, and distinguished professor. Then I dug out the program from the Baccalaureate Service the day before and studied that.

In that service, the soon-to-be-graduates recited a lovely responsive prayer together with the college president.

“We seek to understand the shyness behind arrogance, the fear behind pride, the anguish behind cruelty,” she had read.

“All life flows into a common life, if we will but open our eyes to our companions,” the young people had responded in unison.

Reading these words cooled and softened me then, to the point where I stopped my ceaseless evaluations and thought only this:

It doesn’t matter where you stand or how you dress getting your diploma; whether you get it from a dignitary robed like the Pope or a seeming lunch lady elbow-deep in file folders. The point is you made the grade. Your school days are behind you. And nothing you ever do will be as easy again.

• Now let’s try writing something that begins: “I once thought school was a place where …. but really …” and you fill it in and take it from there.

• Or “I used to see school as being….but now I realize it was more like ...” and see if that takes you somewhere nice.

• Or you could write down “I went to college thinking I would learn…” etc. “but instead I found out...” More to say? More there?

Any one of these ought to be fruitful for you. Or you can make up your own beginning. Take plenty of time and don’t worry about the bell; they’ve extended the period for us.

Ravenscroft Press ©Copyright 2007 Terry Marotta, All Rights Reserved.