Graduation

Despite the fact that my past is, as I remember it, not full of things for which I would expect to be sentimental, I am deeply prone to feelings of nostalgia. I have a sense that, rather than being sentimental for the past, my particular variant of nostalgia is one in which I become sentimental for the way I wish things had been.

I become wistful over what could be, rather than what was.

A curious thing about nostalgia is that I never know when it is going to strike. If you had been living with me, as XGF did, during the years in which my youngest brother was dying, you would have witnessed me becoming sentimental, nostalgic and/or wistful over TV commercials. They always depict something blissful, and even a smart consumer like me -- one who knows the acquisition of the item advertised will *not* bring more love into my life -- can easily fall prey to those idyllic images that are illuminated through the use of the right lightbulb. (The worst were the advertisements for "cotton, the fabric of our lives.")

Perhaps the most enduring cultural images that provoke my sentimentality, however, are the collective works of Norman Rockwell. Growing up, those pictures showed me what life somewhere else -- among people who loved each other, for example -- might be like. They evoked deep nostalgia in me as a kid. I wanted to believe in love and happiness so desperately, despite not having much in my real life that would give me reason to believe such things exist and that actual humans experience them.

What does this have to do with the graduation I attended today?

That's a question I've been asking myself this evening.

I am feeling deeply moved. My sense of nostalgia has been provoked so profoundly that I'm actually pained by it.

Watching several of my friends graduate with their master's degree today was a thing of beauty and a thing of pain all wrapped up in one. It's not just that they are done with school and I am not, although that certainly has its own way of adding to the complexity of my feelings.

Rather, it was something in the ritual itself, this moment where we all pause to observe the completion of a particular phase of life and the accomplishment of completing a monumental task. Many of my classmates dedicated themselves to an intense process, a personal exploration of self and relationships, an academic examination of human nature. These are no small tasks, and so acknowledging them with ritual hoodings, soaring speeches and the occasional Rumi poem seems not just appropriate but necessary.

Anytime you open a door, it will eventually close behind you. Sometimes, it's important to pause for a moment and watch it happen.

And so my heart sings and laments for the work and progress of my friends and classmates.

But there is something more from today that is eating at me, and I am not sure exactly what. That nostalgia really started coming home to roost during the keynote speech, given by a woman of great accomplishment whose name I have already forgotten.

She kept talking about home and about place, about finding your place in the world and making it your home, no matter where it is. She talked about exploration and destination. About connection to your community and its history. She talked about how literature captures and preserves the life of our culture. She talked about how experience is not just a matter of us seeing the mountain, but of the mountain seeing us.

Whoever she was, she was poetic. Soft but powerful in her presentation. Genuine. Someone who seemed filled with both love and ambition, which is a curious and remarkable combination in my view of things.

I had to shut her out a bit, to tell the truth. I busied myself writing cards to a couple classmates because taking in the fullness of this woman's beautiful oratory would have made me weep. And I really didn't want to weep. At least not then and there.

After all the talking was done -- including an amusing little speech by Dr. M, who successfully nominated herself as student commencement speaker -- the graduates received their hoods, the diplomas were conferred, and we (S2, myself and a classmate for whom I have not found a sufficient nickname) applauded and cheered for our various school chums as they walked on stage. (The one with no nickname kept telling me I should be next year's student commencement speaker, the prospect of which is not just unlikely but ... potentially dangerous.)

Then, the ceremony done, we went outside to greet them on the sunny, pastoral campus that has always felt to me like a place apart, with its beautiful manor houses and ivy-covered walls. We stood out there on a hill above the crowd and waited as our graduating classmates made their way uphill to a reception.

Here comes YogaGirl, with her parents, her boyfriend and a sibling in tow, a little teary-eyed as I would expect her to be. Here comes The Debutant, who (true to form) told her significant other the wrong date for graduation, thus creating a situation where he missed the ceremony because he had to work. Here comes little Jeffy, and JP. Up on the hill, I found Bubba and Dr. R and Dr. M.

There were hugs and photographs and kind words all the way around. I am reluctant to tell people I am "proud" of them because it always feels, to me, like a sense of ownership (or some other elevation of myself above them) is implied in doing so. But that is what I felt for a few of them anyway.

After the reception, S2 drove me home and, dropping me off at my place, she made a comment that surprised me. She said she hoped my "melancholy" was not too bad. I started crying right then, unable to restrain the complex stew of feelings I was having, which ranged all the way from anticipating the loss of some of these relationships ... to recognizing my lack of skill and grace even in my close friendships ... to that demon of mine that persistantly raises its head at such moments and asks obnoxious questions like: And who is going to celebrate *you* when you finally finish this stuff? You who has no people to call your own? You who wouldn't know the "home" that speaker talked about if it bit you on the ass...?

I saw my classmates with their people -- their family and friends -- and I felt lonely. I felt lonely a year in advance of actually having to contend with this event myself. By which I mean the separation from school and my identity as a student and of having to experience, again, this casting of myself out into the world, a solo sailor.

I went home, changed into some shorts, and met Bubba, her Lovely Lawyer Lady and her mom at an Italian eatery in the Pearl. I had some pasta and a few glasses of wine in the warm afternoon sun. I toasted my friend and her accomplishment. We ate gelato for dessert.

For whatever reason, when I hugged her, I kissed her neck and licked it. The lawyer looked at me with a false jealousy and asked, "What was that?" And so, I walked over and kissed her neck the same queer way. It was the first time my tongue has touched the flesh of another person in nearly a year and a half. Neither of them was particularly tasty (meaning: not bad, just bland), but the texture was refreshing.

I returned home and crawled into bed and napped for two hours. Woke up and still felt the weighty presence of the nostalgia and sentimentality, the wistful wanting and the fear of seeing my fragile social network disintegrate.

I am nostalgic for what I never had. And wistful for what I can only wish for myself.

But I am so pleased for my friends.