Graduation

It often seems as though America has mixed feelings about having gotten rid of its ties to England, and by extension, the monarchy; because for a country founded on essentially pragmatic ideals, we sure loves us some ceremony. One such ceremony is graduation. In England I attended two schools, junior and secondary, and in each case I attended for a set number of years, at the end of which I ceased to attend. I had no graduation ceremony, unless it was something so bland that I've either blanked it from memory or simply remember it as something else.

Here there are typically three stages of schooling, elementary, middle and high. At the age of fourteen, my stepson has just finished middle school. He'll be starting at high school in August, but first he must graduate, which I suppose is as good an excuse for ceremony as any.

The other day as I left the local supermarket, I myself was granted an award for having graduated the store. Everybody cheered. The manager shook my hand. We enjoyed a buffet lunch with a slide show, fond memories of my picking a particular brand of bratwurst only minutes earlier, or calculating the cheapest cat food option, then silently cursing the supermarket's continued failure to restock Newcastle Brown Ale.

Just kidding, as my wife is fond of saying.

Junior seems a little shell-shocked that this stage of his education should have come to an end, and that in a few months he will be at a different, much larger school with other kids. Bess and I feel the same. We're going to miss the place.

We find our seats in the church, where most of the ceremony will occur. The church is part of the school because it's a private religious school. I gather it has cost a bit to send our boy here, but the other side of the family are paying so we haven't had a problem with that aspect. There are seven of us in all, two parents, two grandparents, an aunt, a cousin, and myself. We sit mostly in silence waiting for the show to begin as other parents and relatives slowly drift in.

'No sign of Courtlandt,' I mutter.

'He's busy packing,' Bess tells me. 'He's going to Venezuela.'

She already told me this but I'd forgotten. Courtlandt's brother is here, but not his father; nor his mother for that matter.

The children assemble for a song and then prayers, and there's a lengthy sermon from the priest, finally an address from the school principal. The occasion is sober, so somehow it doesn't get a chance to become boring. We all understand why we're here and that today is significant.

Junior started off at a military school, a place serving as an illustration of how money doesn't always make things right. For the most part he was miserable there, and my wife's email inbox received daily complaints from alleged teaching staff noting how our kid had spent two minutes staring out of a window, or had recently enjoyed an unusually long bathroom break.

Maybe he was taking a shit and the fucker came out sideways, I used to reply. How the fuck should we know? You're the fucking teacher, aren't you?

Obviously I didn't write that, because Bess has always dealt with that side of things, for obvious reasons.

The situation, whatever it was, came to a head when our boy was given a psychiatric evaluation by a committee of twelve people charged with delving into the mystery of why he might occasionally spend two minutes staring out of a window.

Everything changed when we moved him here. Suddenly he had friends, he was clearly happier, his grades were better, and we were no longer subject to daily emails on whether or not it looked like his hair had been combed that morning. It's a small school with just eighteen kids in his year, and we feel a little as though we've got to know a few of them through him; and now it's coming to an end. For once I understand why we're having a ceremony.

I was kind of average at school.

Secondary school came as a shock after junior school. Junior school worked on an unspoken assumption of the teachers being pretty much on your side; and then I turned eleven and entered a larger, colder world in which one would regularly be yelled at for doing nothing at all, just as a reminder of who was in charge. I didn't feel particularly sentimental about the whole experience when I left.

This middle school, on the other hand, seems closer in spirit to my junior school. No-one really seems to have an enemy. The kids enjoy coming here, and the teachers appear to enjoy teaching them; and, as I say, it's all coming to an end.

We all take holy communion, going to the front and dipping our wafers in a goblet of wine, which I had previously assumed was an exclusively Catholic thing. I'm not even religious but it doesn't really matter. Ceremony is the cement by which we keep all the bits of our lives glued together, and as such it has its place.

Individual kids accept awards for achievements of one sort or another, then their graduation medal - or whatever it is - and then there are announcements about who will be going to which high school. Two others are going to Antonian with our boy, but I still get a lump in my throat as certain kids are revealed to be going further afield. Elijah gets a big cheer, which is nice and as it should be.

Elijah is a trans girl, one whose decision to attend school in the gender with which she feels most comfortable caused certain tremors in the parentsphere, because this is a religious school in Texas attended by the children of the conspicuously wealthy, present company excepted. Certain parents withdrew their children upon learning that Elijah would be attending school as a girl, perhaps fearing that the gay radiation would turn their own formerly healthy offspring into heathen faggots, or something of the sort. The Principal wrote to these parents explaining that his Christian values demanded that he show understanding and that he support Elijah's decision, which I personally thought made a nice change to how one might ordinarily have expected such a narrative to play out. In his shoes I simply would have told them to fuck off, which is probably why I'd be a poor choice for his replacement.

The board, or whoever is responsible, has asked that the Principal step down, so the rumour has it. I gather they're none too happy about the fees certain parents are no longer paying, having taken their kids somewhere with a less tolerant interpretation of Christian values.

I try to imagine how it would have been for Elijah at my own school. Her life wouldn't have been worth living.

She walks up to accept her graduation medal - or whatever it is -  and the thoughts one might anticipate arising in such a situation don't apply. It isn't a travesty, or an affront to Himself upstairs, or a man in a fucking dress, or any of the things you may consider in the event of your really, really, really needing to be angry about something.

It's just a young girl at her graduation, and one hell of a brave one, and I'm thankful that the world has at least evolved enough to allow this to take place. There's no good reason for it to be an issue.

After the ceremony we retire to the gymnasium, now converted into a dining room. There is a buffet, and the food is pretty good. We fill plates and watch a slide show of the kids, a memorial of the last four or five years, however long it has been. There are photos of their recent visit to Washington DC, then in class, engaged in science experiments or sports. There are photos of them all goofing around in the sun under blue Texas skies, and we all think about how this combination of young people will never occur again under these circumstances. The Principal does the rounds, so I make a point of shaking his hand, and as I do so, I know I am shaking the hand of a man who has made his small part of the world a better place for the people living therein.