Henrietta Hay's Column

The majestic strains of "Pomp and Circumstance" have always given me goose bumps. Last week was no exception. It was graduation time again.

I heard it this year in Stocker Stadium, watching my friend Chris and the rest of the members of the class of 1995 of Grand Junction High School get their diplomas. It was a very impressive ceremony. I wonder what their generation will be called. The letter X has been taken to describe the one ahead of them. Maybe they will be the Y generation, but I hope not the Z.

As I watched the graduates in their caps and gowns march onto the field my mind wandered to other graduations, to other generations of young people, all so new and freshly minted, all so different and yet so much the same.

On that day last week I was sitting, give or take a few rows, where I sat exactly thirty years ago watching the largest class in the history of Grand Junction High School graduate. There were 568 of them, including my son Dave, my friend the philosopher and many others who are my friends today. Many of their children were marching onto the field last week. They were the vanguard of the baby boomers, and on that May day in 1965 they had no idea what was ahead for their generation. Next month they will gather for their 30th reunion and try to figure it out.

A few years before that I heard Pomp and Circumstance as I watched the class of 1957 graduate. Neither my son John, who was in that class, nor either of the two friends of his whom I located, could remember for sure where the ceremony was held. But we agree that it was almost surely in the auditorium of the brand new High School. That was the first class to graduate from the new building. They did not have a "generation name." They went to college in the fifties - between war (second world), and flower children (Vietnam).

Another graduation took place in Englewood in 1930. That time I was one of those who marched in, but we certainly were not in caps and gowns. I have absolutely no idea what the ceremony was like, where it was, or who was there. I do know that the graduates were dumped unceremoniously into the middle of the Great Depression to sink or swim. If we had been going in for names those days, we might had been called the "Hungry Generation." The class is having a 65th reunion luncheon next week for the 25 of us that are still around. The depression generation illustrated that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

As I looked around Stocker Stadium last week I realized that graduation is not really for the graduates. It is for the mothers and fathers and grandparents and friends and teachers and the school system itself. It is for the whole support system that spent twelve years getting those kids onto the field that day, the people who pushed and prodded and got them out of bed at 7:00 a.m. and made them do their homework and hauled them to band practice and baseball games and field trips. It is for the people who cheered them on, who picked them up when they fell, who encouraged them and scolded them and worked to make solid citizens out of them.

Graduation is for the people who are so very proud of their children. It is for the mothers and fathers who have to face the fact that their children are not children any more, that their relationship with these young people has changed, and knowing all too well the scary world that awaits them.

Sure, the world today looks different than it did when I graduated from high school. We have TV and fast cars and computers and AIDS and space travel and millions more people. But I suspect that the 1930 graduate and the 1995 grad are pretty much alike. At 18 we all thought we knew the answers, but were secretly scared that we didn't even know the questions. We wanted to be adults, but weren't quite sure how to do it. Are today's grads much different?

I congratulate all the 1995 graduates. Even more, I congratulate their parents.