Five years ago this weekend I donned cap and gown and took to the aisles of the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum Expo Center for my high school commencement.
I recall talking with friends, including our class president, about the class reunions which seemed so far off. The talks were of the cliché Vitamin C "Graduation Song" variety: Where will we be? What will we look like? Who will be knocked up? Conversations seeming of the utmost importance back then but are clearly the most trivial now.
We didn't know the answers then, and I gather very few of us do now.
Well, I know I'm not knocked up. That's a start, at least. Suffice to say, it takes this annual reminder of accomplishment to force a reflection of what has been and what could be.
During the most recent Winter Break I bumped into our class president at a bar in our hometown - a place we'd have killed to get into five years ago. We played catch up for a bit, and then I joked about his work on our five-year reunion. He chuckled and said there wasn't a reason to have a reunion yet. We've stayed in better touch than previous classes because of social networking sites. Most of us still return home during breaks. No one has really changed that much, he argued, outside of entry-level jobs and degrees. We can learn those details from a little Facebook stalking.
Graduation is one of those occasions that warrant a year mark regardless of how long ago the event took place. Birthdays and weddings join the ranks of cheerful events we forever attach to a date. Few other circumstances rise to this status in our memories, and when they do it's because we've overcome a form of devastating adversity.
For every joyous peak in life there exists a valley of grief. The happiness of new life warrants a birthday, yet the anniversary of one's death can be as painfully remembered. Relationships are marked with anniversaries, but breakups haunt us indefinitely, whether we admit to it or not.
There is no clear opposite of graduation. It is an irrevocable accomplishment. So much can be taken from us in a climate of crime, terrorism and nature, yet education remains forever ours.
There is a counterargument to this, given the circumstances of disease and disaster - situations when our physical and mental heath can be taken from us over time or in the blink of an eye, respectively. These occurrences are arguably acts of g/God(s), or at the very least are out of our control. They can't be considered the yin to graduation's yang, or whichever way it would be.
Considering the frightening and patronizing nature of kindergarten - "Mommy, I want you to stay!" - perhaps our first day of school is the closest we get to the valley of grief. Life was, after all, quite horrible with daily naps and twice-daily snack times. Those benefits, which we feel entitled to well into our 20s, are quickly taken from us as we climb the education ladder. Eventually we jump off that ladder, or reach the top and ring the bell to a point of annoyance, like a game of Jacob's ladder at the fair.
Doctors, we call them.
Sooner or later the education process ends, and we all fall into the workforce. There we face steeper and more awkward ladders of the corporate variety. We search not for snacks but for health benefits. Our recess time is marked on pay stubs as "vacation days." Together we pump our fists in the air in protest of an unfair situation; while once considered a temper tantrum, we instead call these union strikes.
And just when everything is going well, our manager calls us into the office like a principal and hands us a pink slip, plunging us into ... a valley of grief.
While we hope to never encounter an excessive amount of life's pitfalls, they are inevitable. An unknown dose of events with "insert number years ago" remembrances awaits us all. Until they've passed, a class reunion is as trivial as it was four years and eleven months ago.
Write to Dave atheydave@bewilderedsociety.com
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