Every once in a while, a bunch of different events get scheduled in
the same period. That's been the case these last two months. Right
before A-kon I attended the wedding of some friends, and had just a
few days to get ready for Dallas. A-kon was a success, and I've got
an upcoming post detailing my adventures there. Hint: people lost
their pants.
But last month, well last month I flew out to Nevada, put on a suit,
and watched as my daughter walked up onto a stage, was handed a
diploma, and then moved the tassel on her cap from one side to the
other.
I'm proud of her. I'm happy that I was able to be there to witness
her milestone achievement.
Nope. Those words don't do the moment justice.
Maybe I'm just getting old and sentimental (yeah, fuck you too), but
I want to get this right. I want to put down in words how I feel,
describing it well enough so that a thousand years from now when
time-traveling bug-eyed aliens from Neptune browse the web, they'll
find this post and say, “Okay, we understand.”
I was there when my daughter was born. She was tall and strong as a
baby, and she only got taller and stronger as time went on. When she
was, I think, five years old, she challenged something I was telling
her, an event that found its way into the story I was then writing.
Her mother and I divorced when she was still young, and I had to sit
down with her one day and tell her that when she came home from
school that afternoon that I wasn't going to be there. That memory
still hurts.
Through the years we've been separated by as little as a hundred
miles and as much as the entire length of the country. Time went on,
without all those day-to-day moments when life happens. That's a
loss I can never make up.
But last month I hopped on a plane and flew to Nevada. The desert
climate didn't faze me, but the elevation was murder. I spent a
short day talking with her and getting as caught up as I could, and
then I stood in line, then took a seat along with a thousand other
parents, all of us waiting for our turn to witness for our children.
There were signs forbidding horns, balloons, and big gaudy banners,
and I saw dozens of each before the ceremony began. I should have
brought some.
They didn't call the class up in alphabetical order, so everyone kept
following along with the names as they were listed in the schedule,
holding it up and carefully moving their finger down each line as the
names were called out. (this all happened in a college auditorium, so
I also should have brought some binoculars) Somewhere, deep down and
propping up all that eagerness and enthusiasm, I don't think there
was a person in that building that wasn't holding the door to their
anxiety closet shut as hard as they could. I think we all shared a
secret dread that the name we were waiting for would never be called.
That someone would go through all the paperwork one last time and
find some signature missing or some box not checked and say, “Whoops.
Well at least we caught it before they tried to graduate.” Bet it
was even worse for the ones waiting to be called.
I waited. Her boyfriend's family waited. Everyone waited.
They called her name. A thousand people watched her walk across that
stage to get a handshake and a diploma, and none of them had a bigger
smile or a more swollen chest than me. If I could have opened the
roof of that building to shout to the whole world, 'Look at what my
daughter has achieved,' I would have done it, and you would have
heard it.
My daughter has graduated.
Still smiling about it. I'm happy to have written about it, too.
