Commencement

Graduation season is upon us. Our readers will see that several of our pages are devoted to coverage of local comme n c eme nt s this week. Soon we will publish our annual high school graduation section. Another school year has come and gone.

It was 30 years ago that I graduated from Longwood College. I received my bachelor of arts on May 8, 1993. I still think of the 1990s as being 10 years ago. But I did the math and even though math was never something at which I excelled, I cannot dispute that 2023-1993=30. I can still remember that hot day in May. That morning my sorority sister Kathy Brown who was also graduating said to me in a singsongy voice, “Wake up! Wake up!” I had been out quite late and I had to be procession ready at 8 a.m.

I grumbled something and headed for the shower. I found something to wear under my graduation robe and walked over to Jarman Auditorium where all the graduates were gathered. I said farewell to my friend Anna Radford who had been at Longwood on a golf scholarship. She was from Kent, England, and we always thought we were related in some way as Radford is my middle name.

I realized that I was wearing the wrong colored hood for my degree and I had to make a quick trip to the bookstore to rectify that situation.

Graduation took place on the lawn in front of the Wheeler dormitory, then known as the Virgin Vault because it housed freshman girls. The guest speaker was a high ranking executive at AT&T. I sat between two people I had never seen before, which was strange to me. It was a small campus and I thought I knew everyone.

After receiving my degree, I could not find my way back to my seat. Perhaps if I had known the students I was sitting next to, I would have been able to spot my chair with more accuracy. My late night partying also probably played a part in my perplexment. There is probably footage of me looking for the place where I had been sitting on some videotape somewhere. Hopefully it is not readily accessible.

As the graduates filed out after the ceremony, the professors were lined on either side of our procession. Dr. Kathleen Flanaghan told me that her son Gabriel would miss me. I babysat Gabriel my senior year and we pretended dinosaurs were in the backyard and we had to come up with ways to combat them.

I wanted to shake Dr. Gordon Van Ness’s hand. He was a tough professor in my core curriculum, but he was one of my favorites. He told me, “I’m afraid a handshake won’t do.” He hugged me. I couldn’t believe he hugged me.

Dr. Frank Moore, my French professor, just gave me a sly wink as I passed by. He always appreciated my creative reasons for being late to class. I still remember how he chortled when I said, “I had a layover in Stockholm.”

Afterwards there was a reception in the Blackwell Dining Hall. I talked to my music appreciation teacher and she told me that I had the highest exam score in the whole class. I took that class as an elective and I still have some of the cassettes from the course that I still listen to on my cassette player in my 2001 Toyota Corolla.

I packed up my belongings that day, stripping my single bed of its Walmart bought linens from freshman year. The posters came down revealing stark cement walls. The color TV Dad bought for me was carried carefully down the stairs. It was enormous in size and it contained memories of MTV viewings, the night the Berlin Wall came down and all the times my friends and I watched “The Brady Bunch” reruns and we knew it was time to go to dinner when “Good Times” came on.

The residence education coordinator Ken Rockenzies appeared on the stairwell as I was moving out. He had been my boss when I worked at the front desk at Tabb Hall. He was smoking a cigar. He hugged me several times, scattering ashes on my sweaty T-shirt shoulders.

I arrived at Longwood in a U-haul freshman year, but I brought everything home in my mother’s tiny Plymouth Horizon upon graduation.

By the way, if you’ve ever wondered why English majors are especially giddy on their graduation day, the reason is that they will never have to read anything by Herman Melville ever again.