Graduation Day
A Short Story in the Slice of Life Series
David Lee Howells
Copyright 2013
Brainwork
Valedictorian Gail Gruner sat at the diner with salutatorian Andrew Potts. Their roles at the graduation ceremony normally were clear, having the comfort and format of tradition, yet allowing ample room for creativity. Traditions had it that the valedictorian be, more often than not, the student with the greatest academic achievement. Gail had that in the bag. Her sophomore AP English Lit instructor still found himself defending the A-minus he awarded Gail on her project paper. Her argument that she finished it while sick in bed with bronchitis had only pushed it up from the B-minus originally awarded.
Valedictorians gave the address, the ‘valediction’, from a student’s point of view, and surely there were those that found fame if not fortune when sufficiently memorable and clever. The best she found on a web search wasn’t even valid, though. “Wear Sunscreen” was supposedly the commencement speech given by Kurt Vonnegut in 1997. It wasn’t, but it was still famous. She had studied it for inspiration, got some great ideas from it, and now was unable to apply it. She smiled half heartedly to think she could not apply ‘Sunscreen’.
Salutatorians like Andrew Potts were traditionally the second-highest grade cume students, which Andrew wasn’t. He was in the top five percent, but speaker rank also took into account extracurricular activities. Andrew’s presidency of the GO (General Organization) for four years in a row lime-lighted him for the traditional salutatorian salutation. Together they represented academia and civic participation. No one could argue that.
But Principal (Mad) Myrtle Winthrop brought to the school a progressive breath of air from the now retired John Pendergraff. Traditions long held dear to the school could be kept, in her mind, but with evolving aspects so that there is a newness to the equations. Didn’t children, whom parents love for their lifetimes, evolve a little each day? Her school’s graduation ceremony would have service and studies highlighted. That would be kept intact. But, they needed to be united, or at least better connected. She wanted both speaking students to speak together, sharing the same space at the same time, “Like some comedy team. Andy, wasn’t school hard enough? Why complicate things that don’t need complexity? It WAS simple. You give the greeting and retrospective, I give the witty observations and thrilling view to the future. Done deal, give us the pigskins that never hurt a Wilbur or Babe and boot us to college, trade school, or working with dear old Dad.”
The traditionally congenial Andy was also not living up to his track record tonight. “Sorry Brainiac. You wanna cry in your Coke or come up with a game plan? Whining to me isn’t going to get you a grade bump or help us figure out what to do.”
Andrew and Gail weren’t enemies, but they weren’t friends, either. The strong focus and achievements that brought them to this table in the first place had them traveling in different circles of friends and schedules.
“You’re a lot nicer when you’re campaigning, and I didn’t whine. I had a valid mitigating circumstance. The least he could have done was assign me an extra credit project.”
Andy took a bite of his burger and swallowed, but he wasn’t swallowing any ‘po-po-pitiful-me’. “Right, so you could graduate princess pristine perfection, your Lit teacher had to come up with a separate project, wait for you to finish it, spend extra time to assess and grade it and do more paperwork to bump your grade and treat you differently than everyone else. Get over yourself. You got your acceptance to your Ivy League plus scholarships.”
“Andy, what is your problem? I wasn’t dumping on you. You nervous about going from big man on the political campus to college where you’ll be small frog in the pond?” That stung, and Gail could see it hit something unintended. “Andy? What is it?”
One of the reasons Andrew Potts put so much into his high school experience was because, most likely, that’s where it would end. His father had a small landscaping business, but he also had worsening back issues. It was Father Potts’ dream and stated wishes that Andrew take over for him, though father was very proud of son and believed strongly in education for his children. But it was the business that kept the family fed and housed and clothed, and he just couldn’t keep it up any more. Hiring help wasn’t economically feasible right now. Maybe with Andrew’s help, Dad said, they could get a leg up enough to expand the business. Maybe Andrew could pursue his college options then. Maybe. His future was a bunch of maybes.
“It’s nothing. Sorry. You didn’t deserve that. OK, let’s brainstorm, all right?”
That was so out of character for Andy, but what did she know about him? His father was a naturalized citizen following the American Dream. Andrew was the oldest, helped his Dad a lot, and it showed in his muscular physique and ‘get it done’ attitude. Home or school, he dug in and got the job accomplished.
“We all have our off-days. Things are about to change big time and we’ve still got finals. Forget it. All right…the comedy team approach isn’t all that bad an idea. Humor keeps a speech moving. Being retro and pro on our viewpoints is still a good contrast to include, but we have at tops twenty minutes to boil down four years of school experience and be rah-rah on our future prospects. How do we tie past and future together and make it memorable?”
Andy buried his future concerns for the moment and tried to get into the game. “Maybe if we take a step back and get a different take on things. Gail, picture yourself ten years from now, or even just five. Pretend you’re looking back on school. What do you think might be memorable?”
“Other than falling short of being princess pristine perfection? Nice alliteration, by the way.” She was mostly kidding, but not entirely. That one-mark-short of a perfect score rankled some part of her inner clockwork, making her divided on Andy’s wince-reaction to her response. Was she OCD? “I don’t know. Friends? Parties, I guess. Class ski trips. Cafeteria food. The teachers that made an impression on me. Sports games. How about you?”
“I guess some of that, and pep rallies, the elections, school assemblies, when the choir did carols in the halls just before Christmas break, oh, and that wreck that killed Jamie and Pasqual, remember that? Probably I’d get a fit of nostalgia and look at the yearbook. It’s mostly visual, and it would help me remember guys and gals I got to know. I’d probably wonder what happened to them.”
Gail was jotting down the topics on her spiral-bound notepad, stopped, and looked at it. “You know what neither of us said?”
“What?”
“Graduation. Neither of us felt it was worth mentioning just now. Is it important? We both skipped it even though we’re talking about it now.”
Not a bad observation, Andy thought. Maybe Brainiac was more than a memory machine. “Well, maybe we didn’t mention it because we haven’t done it yet. You gotta do it to remember it?”
“Good point. Since we also haven’t experienced leaving the school behind, maybe we need someone else’s point of view…people who have already graduated. Hey, partner, let’s attack it this way. Pick people one year, five, fifteen and twenty five-years graduated. That’ll give us a time line to compare what memories last, what’s important in the long haul.”
Synergy was being achieved, things were opening up. That was a major mood lifter for Andy. “Hey, that’s pretty good. You know, I call you Brainiac with the best possible meaning.”
Gail didn’t smile. “I never liked that name and still don’t. Just because I excelled, I got called a name mostly by people who thought I wasn’t like them. You hate the term wetback, right, even if someone’s kidding you?”
“Oh, come on, Gail. You don??
?t like the nickname? Fine, I’ll drop it. But you can’t compare the hurt value of a name indicating brilliance of one person to one that demeans a whole group of people just trying to make a better life for themselves.”
Nothing was black and white, was it? Andy made a decent point, but, “Maybe not, but maybe you shouldn’t assume how much a name hurts someone else. You don’t like name calling? I don’t blame you, so apply that same attitude to how you treat me. Wetback and Brainiac. They’re both forms of bullying and bigotry, so let’s drop it.”
There was much inside of Andy that needed venting, but what was the use of doing that here? She had a good point. He couldn’t argue it, but he wanted to argue something successfully and get that good feeling he had when he won the GO President debates each year. But those were done and he had won each battle. He had batted a thousand, and that thought stopped him short. Gail had missed her perfect score in what was important to her, but he hadn’t with what was important to him. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so cocky at her had he lost an election or two. The dial on his emotional oven was turned down a few notches.
“OK, salutatorian bows to valedictorian on this one and offers an olive branch. We got WIFI here. I got my iPad. Hang on.” Andy pulled up the school’s site. He remembered it had a link to the yearbook archives. “All right with you if we start at five years? That’ll make who we choose more random. We probably know a lot of people who graduated just last year. That might bias the survey choices.”
Gail liked it. It made statistical sense. “But do we do male or female for each year? One of each for each year?”
The momentum was keeping the good feeling up for Andy. He wondered for a moment if that was some kind of addictive behavior. “Sure, makes sense. Still need to randomize better. I have a random number generator app here, so we’ll assign each alphabet its sequential number value to start off with. Here we are on the yearbook archives…OK, five years ago. Got it. Ladies first, not that it’ll make any difference in the long run. First letter, wait for it, ‘W’. A consonant. Spinning for a second letter…nope. ‘Q’. Try again. ‘R’. ‘R’? Wait…here we go. Abigail Wright. Hey, how do we find these people once we have them? Five years, maybe she’s married or something.”
Gail suggested they go to the alumni section of the school’s website. Merrihew High had a pretty strong one, she had heard, and reunions were something her parents went to once in a while. Andy had interacted with them before during school fund raisers.
Sure enough, Andy found it in a very short time. Both students went ahead and signed up for membership in the alumni roster to access what the site had to offer. It was a smart thing where someone had made allowance for graduating seniors to sign up before taking off for parts unknown.
This gained Gail and Andy access to the membership roster, which usually had the maiden name in parenthesis between the first and new-last name for women. Once in a while, it was found for men as well. Times change.
“Got her, Gail. She’s married now, one child, graduated SUNY Brockport last year with a degree in Art History. No wonder she’s married…how do you get a job with that?”
“Andy! Don’t be harsh. But you may have a point. Unless you get a Masters, it’s hard to get a job in that field, I hear. It has her contact number?”
“No, not in here. It’s ‘on request’. Kind of makes sense for security, but not really. All I have to do is a people-search…just a sec.”
Gail was impressed at Andy’s rapid success in pursuing his target goal. His fingers flew across the iPad screen and images came and went so fast that she wasn’t able to take in much on any one of them, until, “Got it. Abigail (Wright) Mosley, Pawling NY. There are two by that name, but this one’s the right age. Got the number…um…what do we say? We need to be consistent at least on the intro.”
The two students had a back-and-forth for fifteen minutes and came up with the following script; ‘Hi, we’re calling graduates of Merrihew High School to give us ideas for the commencement speech. If you have a moment, we’d like to ask you what you remember of your school experience that means the most to you.’ It seemed innocuous and open-ended enough to allow almost any response as valid to the past graduate.
Since they were in a diner that had recommendations regarding cell phone usage, Gail pulled out her compatible iPod earphones and changed seating to be next to Andy. He figured out what she was doing, plugged the jack into one of the ports on his iPad, and each plugged in one of the ear phones so both could hear. Andy could type in responses with more accuracy than Gail could write by hand, so he took that function over. Prepared as much as they could be on the initial call, he tapped in the number.
5 years: Abigail (Wright) Mosley
“Why, what a nice thing to do. Of course I’ll help. Sometimes I miss my days at Merrihew and we just had our five year reunion last month. Let’s see. What do I remember most? Let me think.
“I remember I had the biggest crush on the football team captain, Josh Wheeler. I tried for the cheer leader squad, hoping that would get him to notice me, but didn’t make it. I have a mild case of cerebral palsy and that knocked me out of the running. Would you believe that I made the second cut, though? That made those who made fun of me for trying to quiet down. Some of my friends tried to stop me to protect me from getting disappointed. Didn’t let them stop me, either. Miss Kahn, the cheerleading coach (is she still doing Phys Ed there?) was impressed enough to make me her assistant. She told the squad that if I could do as well as I did, then she expected perfection from them. Some of the girls took a dislike to me from that, but others became a new circle of friends. One of them introduced me to her older brother, who I eventually married while I was still in college. He’s been such a dear, supporting me while I go for my Masters.” (Gail gave an elbow to Andy’s ribs. Andy could only smile.)
“But you want the school, not college. Just like me to ramble. I loved my art teacher, Mr. Randall. Funny, that. I’ll be a peer to him before long, but he’ll always be Mr. Randall to me. I wonder if you ever outgrow that. I liked most of the teachers, but he sticks out in my mind as tops. Didn’t like gym all that much, but gave it what I had. People were pretty understanding about my situation with the CP. Other than that, main things that come to mind are dressing up inside my locker, mystery meat, and being in the Junior play, ‘Kiss Me Kate’. Oh, yes. The Senior play was ‘The Glass Menagerie”. I got one of the leads of Laura Wingfield. I was a shoe in, since I already had the limp down pat. Will that do?
5-years: Jonathan Skilling
“I didn’t like school much. I mean, what’s the point of cramming so much down our throats that we’d never need in life? Who gives a damn about the Hundred Years War, and when was the last time you used differential equations? I remember thinking that we should have classes that were tailored to what we wanted out of life. Economics for the future business types, electrical and mechanical engineering for the tradesman types, you know? Didn’t care for a lot of the teachers, either. They seemed to know when you didn’t know the answer and made sure to call on you just to embarrass you. Baker and Landsverk were both sadists on that. Gym was ok, I guess. I liked basketball and soccer. Didn’t get into choir because they said I was tone deaf. Girls were all too stuck up to date, too. I wasn’t social enough for them till I got my license, then all of a sudden I had some status. Pretty shallow, huh? Didn’t get into any clubs or stuff like that. No time for it. Dad has a construction company, so I started working with him since I turned 16.” (Andy’s eyebrows went up for a moment. Would he be sounding like this goofball some day?)
“It wasn’t a complete waste of time. Made some friends. Math skills help in what I do now, and yeah it helps to know how to read and everything. Main thing is that high school is made to prepare you for college, period. Lots of people don’t go onto college, right? Well, OK, there’s BOCES
and VOTECH, so maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh, but those programs need to be emphasized more, you know? Anyway, is that all you want? There’s a game on.”
5 year overview: impressions
Andy asked for another Coke from the waitress. “Never know what you get on a random snapshot.”
Gail nodded. “Wow. Got that right. Put those two together and you have a bipolar disorder. You want to try another two on the 5-year plan, or go on to the 10?”
“Let’s stick with the original game plan for now and get a sweep. We’ll see if the male/female stereotype results get watered down some. Man, that guy was a real dip, but he did have a good point on emphasizing the trades more.”
“But Andy, how can one school tailor a program to each student like that? You have to have a broad base to build on, even if all the parts don’t directly contribute to the end goals of each student. If we overemphasized like that guy was saying, then math people and literature people wouldn’t even be able to hold a conversation. Then there’s the thing where learning history is important so that you don’t repeat it.”
Andy could see her points, but steered more debate back to the project. He’d of liked to talk more about it, though. Gail was pretty cool, so far. “Points held by both of us, let’s leave it at that for now. Both 5-year people had feelings about teachers, though pro and con, and remember attractions to the opposite sex, also pro and con. Both had friends they remembered and both had some recognition that something they learned for their long term careers had relevance to what they were doing now. We agreed on that?”
“Agreed, Andy. By the way, I know plenty of girls who are jerks, too, and you’re definitely one of the good guys.”
Andy smiled, this time honestly. “Thanks. All right, take two. My turn to do the script.”
10 years: Carol (Sealy) Hagadorn