LY #95 Graduation Parties

So I spent too much time thinking about my retirement party today, especially since I'm not organizing it.  I met with my boss, Maestro Michale Gesme, and later sent him and my pal Stacey Donohue an overview of my ideas.  Basically, I want food and alcohol and pleasant companions -- just what Ecclesiastes says are good things to have.

It got me thinking about previous graduation parties.  My favorite was the one thrown by my Aunt Huldah Bell and my dad for my B.A. graduation from Idaho State.  Huldah offered her house for the space and invited folks.  My dad bought a bathtub full of wine. Now, just in case that gave you a picture of someone bathing in fermented grape juice, I should explain that he filled up my aunt's claw foot tub with bottles of wine.  The four members of the department of journalism were in attendance as were a variety of other faculty members and friends.  It was pretty darn awesome and I got pretty darn tiddly toasted.

I don't remember a party after my eighth grade graduation, though there might have been one, and I didn't celebrate the completion of my masters degree.  That was a hard and dark time in my life as I was leaving home and plunging into a future destination unknown.

 I've celebrated two other graduations with smaller, more private affairs.  The night after the 1971 Los Gatos High School graduation, while most of my class went to a bowling alley for a supervised overnight, my friend Leland and I also drove over to San Jose to see a double feature:  Bananas and Take the Money and Run.  The next day we spent the day together at the beach between La Selva and the cement boat at Seacliff.

I celebrated the short walk I took for my 1993 PhD with a dinner party at Lambs in Salt Lake City.  Present were Dad and step-mother Jean, Rosemary Cesarone Tanner, a good friend from my later Pocatello days who had moved to Salt Lake years before I did,  my spouse, and Professor Fox.  I thought of it as a dinner with my three dads -- biological, academic, and "spousal."  You know that my sweet spouse is two decades older than I and people think he's my father and frankly it's true that he did a lot of "raising" of me the first years of our marriage. Anyway, I remember that I ordered the lamb chops but don't recall a bite of their taste.  I was so happy sitting within what I perceived as a circle of protective, fatherly masculine energy all directed toward ME.  (I do love those moments when it's all about me!) 

Nor do I remember a syllable of the conversation that night but I do remember the ritual I wanted and had performed at the table.  Since the beginning year of my time as a graduate student, I'd worn a "rat tail."  I had it when I was hired at COCC.  At the dinner that night I had Professor Fox cut off this symbol of my student status. (I still have it in a box somewhere.)  This was a sign that I had become a "member of the profession."  The academic equivalent of, "Today I am a man," except I didn't recite the Torah.  All the reciting I needed to do was completed that winter at my dissertation defense.

Of course I also remember that I wore a hot pink tailored suit with green piping and green heels that by evening were pinching the heck out of my feet.

While I'm not going to wear hot pink for this next graduation party, I am looking forward to a similarly de-hirsutizing ritual.