Graduation Merry-Go-Round

Sometimes I feel that we do not come alive unless we are in the presence of those who love us and share our histories.

In other words, we are actually dead or in some state of suspended disbelief for most of our waking hours, days, and years.

I imagine in actuality we wait our entire lives for the few desultory moments when we can drop the vellum that shrouds us and live entirely in relation to the few people who buoy us up.

Such was the case of my doctoral graduation. After four years of study, frustration, and occasional pleasure and insight, I found myself rapt in an aura of family for just a few precious days.

May 18, evening. It began when my sister Rowena and her husband, two nieces, and my two children flew out of the sky and found me at BWI airport. My sister's cockeyed optimism infects the whole group -- she has been prodding me to look forward to this day for a lifetime, as though it were really important that I had finally achieved the status of "doctor" at age 57.

We spent the night in Annapolis and ate in a splendiferous French restaurant, Cafe Normandie, which was not expensive and was something that I had found on the Internet. There was a glow to the moment that I cannot forget. We take pictures in a group and I am always amazed at how much theatre and the beauty of actors pervades my sister's family. Everyone is prodigiously handsome on the inside and outside, and there is almost never anything wrong.

The next day I put on robes that seem to me like a cross between high church and Harry Potter. Doctoral robes should be medieval, but they are now mass produced and possibly mass stitched, so they have a kind of cheesy costume quality to them. We sit through 3 hours of ridiculous speechifying in the Comcast Center and David, my brother-in-awe, takes pictures of me that make me seem as though I'm floating in a world beyond the world. I suppose, in some ways, that is true for the moment. I hold up my piece of paper as though it is a graduation from Voldemort's Academy (the dark equivalent of Hogwarts) and now I am a wizard capable of making media fly through air (I think that is a better description of David, who is a fine photographer).

In the afternoon, there is a repeat performance at the Journalism School. A few who didn't want me to graduate mysteriously fail to show up at the festivities while those that do are full of smiles and accolades. These people include my beautiful advisor/wizard, Dr. John Brown, a philosopher of art, and Gene Roberts, who gets an honorary doctorate along with my "hard slogging" one (Note: For Gene, 17 Pulitzer Prizes as Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and one for his own book, The Race Beat, isn't enough!). Gene hugs me after giving a speech about how young journalists still ought to go work for a little home town newspaper, something I should have done rather than going straight to the New York Times as an intern after graduating from Univ. of Michigan.

That night we celebrate at the Chart House. Friends Rick Rudolph and Emily Hartz, lovely advisor Dr. Maurine Beasley, the whole crowd is there...the kids make gracious speeches. Son Emmett stands up and says I am "the best Mom." Daughter Grainne says she owes me for having been dragged to all her shindigs as she was growing up. I remember she held me up while I stressed about my dissertation defense with shaking hands.

The card from niece Danielle DeNottbeck pictures a golden retriever sporting eyeglasses. "I have never been an intellectual but I have this look" -- Woody Allen.

Friday my two nieces commandeer an electric Duffy boat, a 6 mph "putt putt" in the harbor of Annapolis and we see Ospreys building nests inside the cabins of dry-docked boats. Danielle accidentally cuts a few fishing lines and rams the dock as we return. "Oops, sorry!" she shouts to the fishermen who are shouting at her, reminding me of Elle in Legally Blond. Niece Dainna, the veterinarian, splits her pants doing yoga postures in the stern.


Saturday, May 21 2011 we are at the Smithsonian and my son decides to manifest his true saurischian self.

The world was supposed to end on Saturday starting around 4 pm on the West Coast, but nothing happened. We were in the Smithsonian watching an IMAX movie on dinosaurs. Needless to say, no one went extinct in those few hours.

My family is normally scattered to the four winds. It is odd because we actually relish the moments we can be together. But circumstances have not been entirely kind, and we all have our missions, and willfulness, and desire to be independent and functioning in the place of our choosing. And so we are apart most of the time -- most of the time I am welded within an ice shelf, anticipating the few moments when I can be set free to live in the warmth of this small surviving tribe. My children, my sister and her husband, my nieces. My "people."

They do not always understand me. Nor I them. But in this moment when all seemed right after so much had gone wrong, I could bask for a few moments and realize that happiness is a spike in the shake-o-meter of real life. So I enjoyed it to the hilt, and the photos prove it. AE