It’s Graduation season again. Graduating students haven’t had to learn anything new for at least the last 3 weeks. They’re all bouncy and full of energy because they can smell summer freedom from here.
I only breezed across the stage at my high school graduation in order to snag my diploma before heading for the exit, where the rest of my life was waiting at the curb with the engine running. I wasn’t even in the country for my graduation from college. I’ve seen the photos. It looked nice.
The only graduation that I can authentically tuck into my Experiences folder, is my graduation from grade school. And I even struggle with those details because it was so many years ago. Thankfully, I kept a few mementos from the event—unusual for me—and pouring over those has brought the event and those times into clearer focus.
The printed agenda for this milestone occasion was an 8-page booklet. It outlined what to expect from the ceremony, named some of the award winners, and listed all of the graduates. The cover illustration was designed by one of our classmates and she used the balloon letters of youth to spell out the obvious. Under the title, she had drawn a sketch of a girl and a boy in fancy clothes, each awkwardly holding a rolled piece of paper. Or it could have been a stick. In hindsight, the girl looks an awful lot like the girl who drew the picture and the boy looks an awful lot like the cutest boy in our graduating class.
For so many reasons that pairing would have been doomed in real life.
A good look at the 8×10 full-colour group photograph that we had taken after the ceremony (obviously intended for framing), shows everyone looking…well…relieved. The students look flushed with success, and the teachers look much happier than they ever did during class. We’re all in formal clothes and decked out in corsages and boutonnieres, which must have been provided for us.
The music teacher seemed to use her corsage to hold her wrap dress’ plunging neckline closed. The French teacher had his super-wide shirt collar thrown so fully open that one wonders if he and the music teacher were having some sort of decolletage competition.
All of our teachers had shown up for the event (probably by force). Among them was our male gym teacher, a very white ginger who sported a tight afro perm, our vice principal who often smelled like booze (or it could have been 70’s cologne), and our science teacher who lacked 2 fingers on one of his hands. Grade school was never dull.
We girls looked lovely. We all wore pastel or white floor length dresses, except for a sprinkling of cocktail lengths. Some of the dresses had a homemade look to them but definitely none on the scale of mine. Peasant-style dresses were the haute couture of 8th grade that year and I would guess that about half of us showed up wearing dresses with deep flounces around the neck or shoulders, a couple of tiers in the skirts, and ribbons around our waists. (I wonder which peasants we hoped to reflect.)
My mom had made my peasant dress. I clearly picked out the material myself because it was a riotous pink floral, the kind I am always attracted to but should never be allowed to seriously consider, let alone wear. My mom was a very basic seamstress who kept us decently clothed but wasn’t able to add the panache to her homemade stuff that she had been used to before she married and became a mother. Her fall-back trick to make her handmade clothes a little fancier during those years was to add purchased ‘rickrack’ to them. We had rickrack added to pretty much everything that came off her sewing machine. Tops, skirts, pants, dresses. I was the only girl graduating that year who had a riotous pink floral peasant dress trimmed with a contrasting rickrack. Actually, it kicked things up a notch.
A handful of us girls wore flowers in our hair. My flower was fake and double the size of my real corsage. I clearly felt that having a big flower in one’s hair aligned with the whole peasant theme. It did split the attention away from the rickrack, thankfully.
There were two girls from our class who went together to an honest-to-goodness salon to get matching updos and they looked like they were in college compared to the rest of us who had just given our hair a good wash before subjecting it extensively to a curling iron or adding fancy barrettes to jazz up our look. We were 13—that was the best we could do.
The boys had no more experience in being fancy than we did. It was the 70’s so about a third of them wore that leisure suit look—a buttoned-up vest with the matching jacket and pants but set off by a shirt that was open at the collar. Another third chose to wear a bowtie rather than just a tie, and those 70’s bowties were oversized and velvet. The rest of the boys rocked their suits with ties as best they could. One guy wore a plaid shirt with a tie under his 3-piece. He’s probably in jail.
Another of the boys, one who had the face of a cartoon character and a mass of curly red hair, chose to wear a brown 3-piece which he accessorized with a generously sized velvet bowtie sitting proudly at the top of a peach ruffled tuxedo shirt. A ruffled shirt. In peach. No one other than that kid could have worn that outfit and made it home that night without getting blood on it.
I can only bring to mind fragments of the actual ceremony but remember that the thousands of Kleenex flowers in a variety of pastel shades that we had spent weeks making (remember coloured Kleenexes and bathroom tissues???) did indeed zhuzh up the gym somewhat, and although graduation was held on one of those very hot days in June, nobody fainted. Not even Dramatic Denise who threatened to, several times.
This year’s crop of grade school grads will soon be put through their graduation paces. Their outfits, ceremonies, and decorations will be vastly different than mine, but my hope is that they will be lucky enough to burst off into their futures with a cadre of good friends and will leave this chapter of their lives carrying a full packet of innocent and joy-filled memories that they can then regale each other with for decades to come. Just like me.
