In which I return from a post-graduation hiatus and struggle to remember every detail of the past week’s experiences, including but not limited to how many sprinkles were on the cupcake I had at the reception
Guess. What.
I graduated. And it was bittersweet. And I’m happy. And I’m sad. And it’s summer. And my brother still has a week left of school (not now that I waited a week to post this). And, um… I graduated?
They took a picture of us every year since 6th grade. Kinda crappy photo but I think it’s good enough to see that I somehow grew ten feet? DON’T KNOW HOW THAT HAPPENED. clarification: “crappy photo” as in crappy photo of the actual photo. It’s great, Kerry!
I don’t know how big of a deal your junior high / elementary school graduation was (or if you even had one – some schools just go straight into “the land of high school”). I have a liitle bit of a feeling that we make a slightly larger-than-normal fuss about graduation at my school, probably because most of us have (had! aah!) been going to school with each other since we were wee, wee laddies n’ lassies. I mean, it’s definitely no high school or COLLEGE shebang, but… we make a fair commotion out if it, I think.
Anyway (that was another one of those malformed prefaces I tend to write sometimes). Let’s go back like.. one week. It’s our last days of elementary school. Everybody’s cleaning out their lockers, filling up giant trash bags with papers and composition books, half-eaten granola bars* and TechDeck skateboards brought to school earlier in the year. The ~general atmosphere~~ is best described as giddy… with a sprinkle of.. premature sentimentality? Let’s not overanalyze our feelings; it is middle school (still – at this point. also, I have no idea what I mean by that).
Aside from hallway cleanup, we’re also finishing last-minute tests and quizzes. Well, really only one thing, Cultural Literacy, where we have to memorize facts about certain paintings, or the presidents, or world geography, or famous speeches. [One section is] due every trimester and is usually done around this time – the end of the trimester. We’re also doing graduation run-throughs and speech practices.
At home, a particular Spencer Tweedy (WHY did I just refer to myself in 3rd person) is fretting – or his mother is fretting, rather (it’s in 3rd person, now) – over a wardrobe malfunction. You see, all this time, the family had planned on Spencer to wear his Bar Mitzvah suit, which had recently been discovered to be two feet short. Oh no! Although Spencer was quite pleased with his growth, a new problem had obviously arisen – what was the answer? A tailor? A loaner? A wear-it-anyway-and-look-like-an-escaped-mental-patient? Luckily, Mama Tweedy was able to purchase a new one just in time. Thanks Mama Tweedy!
(3rd person stops NOW. also, I don’t know how interested you kind internette-goers are in this minute-by-minute thing here… I guess it’s more for the sake of me remembering and reflecting and feeling like it’s “on paper” than sharing. Feel free to keep on reading, by all means. Or leave the page now and delete it from your bookmarks and unsubscribe from the email list and tell all your friends to do the same and write a letter to me stating that this post is an “excessive waste of time.”)
The day of, I got to school at normal school-getting-to time. We were told to go to this room where there was a parent lady person putting flower lapel thingys on our suits (and flower bracelet thingys on all the girls). After we had those on, we lined up in the back stairway, from which we would EMERGE in a CUTE PROCESSION and walk along the gym floor to the STAGE and TAKE OUR SEATS.
Normally this part is accompanied by the school band, but our gym was slightly renovated this year and the place they always were had been removed, so the guy who makes the music for all our school plays and stuff supplied his own Casio-tune “Pomp & Circumstance.” By this time my mom, as per my prediction, is already (matzah) bawling. Our principal makes a few remarks and my friend’s older brother, an alumnus, shares a speech about how we’re “over-prepared” for society all because of [this school], and “all those times as kids we thought we were just playing a game involving block puzzles and stamps with numbers on them, we were really learning trigonometry” and stuff like that.
Then, after a few more principals’ remarks, it came time for the MEMORY SHARING. I mentioned before that part of our CEREMONIAL TRADITIONS** involves each student making a short homage to certain pre-assigned classmates, respectively. My sharee, a friend of mine and Led Zeppelin-lover (and killer guitarist, might I say), Alex, was the first up. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I know part of it involved “John Bonham, Keith Moon… they don’t hold a candle to Spencer Tweedy,” which is obviously a really super nice compliment (it made a lot of parents laugh, too). Then, it was my turn. I did end up thinking of something to say, even though I had my doubts before, and even though I ended up having to cut out half of my speech due to… a joke in bad taste (it really was in bad taste; alzheimer’s isn’t funny in a room of grandparents, let alone ever, at all). It ended up being mostly about “the emotional roller coast of junior high friendship” (which, luckily, made a lot of parents laugh, too) and of course the kid I was remembering.
For the next part of the ceremony (actually, this happened before the previous paragraph.. but that paragraph is previous), we were all presented with flowers in hand-decorated vases by either our younger siblings or a similar child-figure. The one Sam made for me was all weird and messy, which I liked (it didn’t look like any other one). The younger grades then sung their songs to us (including “Dona Nobis”) and the youngest ones (returning to class) waved goodbye (that part really got my mom/everybody). Finally, we were presented with our “diplomas” – fake ones actually; the real ones would be picked up in the office before we leave – by the old recently-retired principal. It was her thirty-gajillionth (or something) graduation ceremony.
Afterward was the reception-luncheon-thing. Everybody was freaking out… it was nice. An old-as-the-hills tradition is for the newly-graduated kids to ride our school’s elevator (which is adults-only), which we did. Sometime/somehow during this part some gifts managed to collect themselves in my mom’s purse (most of which I still haven’t opened! I should do that!), and finally, after retrieving Charlie from the various people holding him, we went home.
That night was the dance. Of cowse, there was a ridiculous cheezy “PUT CHA HANDS IN THA AIR, AYAR AI-AI AYAR ” DJ, but, hey, what can you expect (that, that’s what)? This year they actually rented one of those new digital photo booths (like the one I had at my bar mitzvah! we got copies of every picture.. potential post? yes?!), whose operator had intense facial bearditidy (eng. he had a cool beard) and he said “Tom Waits” when I asked what his favorite band was. Then I went home again and went to a party next the next day and am going to another party tomorrow and I waited a week to make this post which is now already over like three squillion words. !!
I’m the one in the middle, with the NOT-TRADEMARK-JUSTIN-BIEBER swoosh.
See ya later, middle school. I may not miss junior high, but I’ll definitely miss this school. Peace dawg.
* I had a ridiculous amount of those (not much else, though).
** “traditions” right there really called for an appended ‘z’, but every time somebody/I add/s ‘z’s to words it just looks silly and MySpace blog-era angst-ish. Sorta.
