Grins, gowns and mortarboards

In case you’re wondering, the number one song on life’s Hit Parade this week is Pomp and Circumstance. I’m talking graduation time - for not only Tech, but also Magdalena, Quemado and Socorro high schools - when seniors get to move their tassels to the left and are turned loose upon an unsuspecting world. People will be making inspirational speeches and young folks will have unslung their backpacks and march into a world full of encouragement and optimism.

High school graduation is that once-in-a-lifetime time when you’re nervous and happy and sentimental all at the same time. It’s one of those grand passages of life when everybody who steps onto the stage to receive their diploma steps off the stage a different person. In a way.

A time for joy, a time for tears, a time for adulting, as the Four Freshmen sang way back in the pre-hip-hop days.

One gets to thinking about times gone by, and wondering what’s going to happen next. For many of us, the plans we make for ourselves post-graduation hardly ever work out as imagined.

The eye-opener for me was the summer after graduating when I thought making some college money by selling $50 Bibles door-to-door in faraway North Carolina would be easy. Suffice it to say, I was no Willy Loman and headed home with tail firmly tucked after only three weeks. I was more of a Biff, I guess.

“Life is an improvisation,” Stephen Colbert once said. “You have no idea what’s going to happen next, and you are mostly just making things up as you go along.”

Seems like every year around this time I end up trying to come up with something inspirational or profound for high school graduates, but to be honest, I can’t remember a single word of the speechifying at my own high school commencement, much less at the Baccalaureate service at the Methodist Church. In all likelihood, my mind was miles away, going through withdrawal, you might say.

The best words of advice I received were from my mother when I was trying to learn how to touch type on our old Remington Noiseless: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” I’m joking, of course, it was a quote from Emerson, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

She was also famous for saying, “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” I lied. That was Pink Floyd.

But I digress.

There are all kinds of graduation advice, platitudes, homilies, you name it – in the form of memes – on the Internet. One guy says to start each day by making your bed, “then you will have accomplished at least one thing that day.” I particularly like this from Mark Twain: “20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you do.”

President Jefferson put it another way. “If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.” And I doubt he was referring to making your bed each morning.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to come up with some original words of inspiration but I’m not very good at that sort of thing, so if you don’t mind I’ll turn that job over to smarter people, like Dr. Seuss, who said, “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” Or Richard Costolo on X, who X-ed, “When I was your age, we didn’t have the Internet in our pants. We didn’t even have the Internet. That’s how bad it was.”

Wise men, those two, huh?

Then there’s the wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes: “So, what’s it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don’t recommend it.”

Granted, some things we’re taught in school don’t appear at first blush to be of much use out in the real world, but I have to admit algebra taught me how to think critically. Especially after I flunked it and had to go to summer school and take it over.

The truth is, it all adds to your body of knowledge. I mean, you never know when knowing a few facts will come in handy. Just watch the movie “Slumdog Millionaire.” It’s always good to know stuff.

One last thing. Take heed of the James McMurtry song:

Stay alive inside, don’t be a stranger

Keep a line open to the folks back home

Don’t run and hide when everything changes

Walk between the raindrops, dry as a bone.