Greetings, gentle readers! Old Mother is back in the saddle again, returning to the virtual vaudeville stage after a hiatus spent on Serious Fiction. It’s not that I can’t multi-task. This skill has not eroded over time, like others I can name, for example, the ability to get up from a seated position on the floor without using my hands. It’s just that I thought I’d have more time when the kids left home, but, as you probably could have told me, this was not going to happen, so I focused on The Book. Eight graduations, sixteen moves, six break-ups, and nine new jobs—it all adds up, even though my role is mostly that of an unflaggingly cheerful spectator who also occasionally dispenses emergency gas money via Paypal late at night after I’ve gone to bed. The upshot of this hiatus, however, is that I have a treasure trove of humor material. For example…graduations. The wardrobe requirements for these events kept me pretty busy, especially because three of them took place during the Time of Covid. The standard dressy outfit for Old Mother and suit-and-tie for the Yorkshire Lad did not necessarily serve. I’m sure many of you can relate. The pandemic created a whole new category of event: the destination graduation—similar to the destination wedding, but without that sand-between-your-toes tropical location of choice (I wish).
My first pandemic graduate was Band-Aid Bobby, who loyal readers might recall had been sipping from the cup of wisdom in the Denver area at On A Clear Day You Can See Forever University, aka SeeThis U. His commencement ceremony was one hundred percent and completely cancelled. So instead, he and a friend were ceremoniously presented with alumni mugs by their respective mothers, while Pomp & Circumstance played on an iPhone. This was effected at the relatively-nearby family mountain cabin, and included lavish celebratory decorations in a joint maternal attempt at over-compensation, along with cake and champagne. At an elevation of 9,000 feet, the dress code in early May despite the sun and blue sky was was jeans and chunky sweaters.
The following year, Miss O. graduated from Grin’n’Bear It College in rural Iowa. After fussing with their knitting for a while, the powers that be graciously decided that this event could actually happen: outdoors, with appropriate social distancing, and a severe audience limit. It was 49 degrees with on and off drizzle, so we were all dressed as for a Packers game in January, except for the parents from California or Florida who had no idea what they were getting into. The faculty and guest speakers, of course, got to sit comfortably beneath a roofed, heated platform. In the middle of the second long, droning speech, a sympathetic employee with a key to the dining hall ran off and returned with two fat stacks of red-and-white checked tablecloths which she handed out to the audience while streaking, in ducked position, around and through every row (folding chairs in pairs, set set six feet apart). Even those of us wearing thermal underwear grabbed one, because they helped cut the wind. They were the perfect wardrobe addition, not least because red and white were the school colors, and no, I am not making that up.
Our third and final pandemic graduation ceremony took place the following year at a Riverwalk cafe in downtown Chicago. Wardrobe was dressy casual; old habits die hard, and I was raised to dress up for going downtown, so I will not schlumpf, nor allow my children to. ForeverBaby aka Dimples was the only one of my kids caught in the lockdown net during the high school years. After more than a year of remote learning, he decided this was for the birds, withdrew from school, and knocked off his GED faster than you can say Jack Robinson—in retrospect, perhaps, a wise decision, because what good is high school without dances and proms? Being a seventeen-year-old with his mind on other things, like making up for his temporarily-arrested social life, it never occurred to him that a diploma might be involved in this process. Oh, but it was!
The Esplanade was swarmed with people enjoying their new-found freedom on the very first hot and sunny Saturday afternoon of the season, and the people-watching from our front-row table kept us amply entertained as we waited for our food. Staging the moment of surprise fell to me, and I was a bit nervous. So it was only after I pulled a mortarboard out of my capacious handbag that I realized he was pushing back his chair with a sparkle in his eye that had nothing to do with celebratory headgear and everything to do with the pretty girl about his own age who had just sauntered past with a brindle French bulldog on the leash. Yes, Dimples had been about to jump up and engage this comely passer-by in conversation, using her dog as an excuse—he’s good at that. Educated young man that he was, though, he grasped the situation and swiftly cooperated with the Aged Parents, if only to shorten the period of pubic embarrassment: he clapped on the mortarboard, received his GED certificate, and whisked it off again. And then he made tracks in pursuit of the girl with the dog. But hey–can we blame him? Kid’s making up for lost time!