So, what does a baggy old kayak woman do with herself when her younger(est) child graduates from college? Yeah. No younger children. It was a thought for a while, but somehow the Mouse kind of broke the mold or however you want to say it. Spirited child? ((((er, spirited moom?)))) Not always the best combination. So. When the music started and people in caps and gowns started to walk slowly down the hill yesterday, this crusty old moom had a really hard time disguising the fact that tears were leaking out of her eyes and she was just a smidge away from the raccoon eyes that Maybelline mascara makes when it gets wet. And from a full-fledged out and out sob session… I was numb when the last beach urchin graduated from K. My emotions then were submerged in the frozen depths of Gitchee Gumee. This time I was on the verge of letting all of Gitchee Gumee out. All over everything. Maybelline, be damned.

So, yesterday, I was struggling to keep from opening the floodgates when I heard a loud outburst from behind me. I turned to see that the handsome, well-groomed younger brother of a graduate was seated more or less behind me. Down’s Syndrome? I wasn’t sure. His well-dressed, upper-class-type multi-generational family was gently (or sometimes firmly) trying to keep him from making too much noise. His noise didn’t bother me. I do not like to sit either and I understood his restlessness. I didn’t understand all of his words but I got enough to know that *he* knew his beloved brother (whoever that was) was involved in an important ceremony, one that maybe he knew he himself would never get to… And I loved this grad ceremony although I was sort of counting down columns of names in the program after we got done with the J’s, which was the last graduate I actually *knew*, and I have known Lairi since the early 1990s and her moom and I sat there and laughed loudly about all of our old girl scout adventures. The speaker was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a young 31-year-old novelist from Nigeria. The 2009 class read her book Purple Hibiscus before they began their freshman year and she said things at their commencement that I wanted to say to my own college graduate mouse but lacked the words to say them.

So… the baggy old kayak woman somehow managed to drag herself out of the numbness of the depths of Gitchee Gumee and so she spent the larger part of *today* at a wonderful company picnic at the Planet Ann Arbor’s own Gallup Park. And that batty old bag got a cute cute cute picture of cygnets!!! KW also tried to take a picture of goslings and they were right next to the sidewalk where we were walking but there was this little “hiss hiss hiss” sound and her long-suffering fellow design team members dragged strongly encouraged her to get outta there pretty darn quick… And so life bumbles along…

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.