Our small liberal arts campus doesn’t have a graduation ceremony so much as it has a graduation happening.
The graduates line up down the center seam of the quad, where it is bracketed by trees that were planted sometime after the Civil War, and under every tree is one of the faculty, in full academic regalia, every color imaginable, velvets and satins.
Some of the faculty have drums, big medieval-looking ones, and all of them have buckets of those little paper twists filled with powder that snap and explode when they’re thrown against the ground. Those that play instruments bring them and play — improvising around familiar pop songs.
Then, as the graduates grin and laugh and hug, the faculty throw the noisemakers at their feet, and beat drums, and play music, and they yell huzzah!huzzah!huzzah! which would never sound right at any other time, but in that moment, inside of all that impossible noise and revelry, it is exactly right.
Huzzah!
After what seems like hours, the campanile begins to play, a jumble of bells, and the faculty stop their noise all at once, fall into silence, and then they drop into bows and curtsies, heads down.
The graduates walk past this supplication, the bells pealing into the air, and when they have accepted the honor of the faculty and made a silent loop of campus, one last walk as students cross ground as familiar as our own heartbeats, the bells stop and the students are graduated.
Graduated, because they have accepted wildness, accepted gratitude, accepted contemplation and journey, and finally, accepted each other, because after the bells stop, everyone embraces and exchanges their mortarboards. No one leaves with the one they came to the ceremony wearing.
The first time I watched the ceremony, I was a freshman.
I watched with tears running down my face, partly because I was so moved, so aching with feeling, and partly because my first year had been such a disappointment, and I couldn’t imagine making it to this ceremony and accepting anyone or anything.
The noise, I didn’t realize, is incredible.
The drums, the snapping poppers, the yelling, the music. I can’t hear myself at all, and I am yelling—
Huzzah!
Professor Darling’s regalia is fantastic, red and white with actual lace cuffs, long and trailing, and it somehow suits him. When he sees me and Cal, he drops his drum and embraces us together, more effusive than I have ever known him, his arms so tight around both of us that Cal and I are nearly back to front. I can feel all of us laughing, or crying, I can’t tell. When he pulls back he kisses Cal on the forehead, his hand on the back of his head, and then he takes my face in his hands and kisses me right on the mouth, and it’s the exact right thing to do.
I feel wild.
I feel accepted.
I feel perfect.
When the noise stops and the faculty bow, I let my tears fall straight from my heart into the air.
Cal laces his fingers through mine, and we walk.
He shows me the spot where he stopped me one cold day in January and I almost hit him. I show him the tree where I saw Becky and John Darling making out one night when I was walking back to my dorm from the library.
Our clasped hands tighten, then relax, and we leave each other to our own thoughts.
The campus looks the same, of course. I wonder when it would look different, or if it ever will, even when it inevitably changes.
I look at the buildings, the people, memories flashing through my mind, visions of Cal, of Beth, of Marvin and Finn, of myself over four years of seasons, learning, changing.
When we come back to the center of the quad and the bells stop, I see her.
I know you, I think, startled.
Because she is me.
She is me, three years ago, and I see her standing there, arms wrapped around her body, and she is just the same.
She’s so beautiful. She doesn’t even know it.
Not yet.
But I do.
I will always know you, I tell that girl who is me three years ago, watching her first graduation ceremony with tears running down her cheeks.
I get right inside her, where it is dark, and I tell her to drop the art history class she’s registered for and take the theater prerequisite in the spring.
I tell her that it’s okay to linger in the lobbies of buildings where people are laughing, to ask someone who knitted their scarf, to get A-minuses — or B-minuses, for that matter.
After all, a B-minus is what Maggie gave me in Theater 309.
It was the best grade I have ever received.
I tell her, I love you, Winnie-girl. Keep an eye out for me.
She’ll always be here.
I’ll always be here.
You are here.
I am here.