Tomorrow, I am off to Spokane, Washington, my home for four years while I was filling my head with academic things and learning how to act like an adult while daily practicing childish things.
I loved college.
Spokane promises an entire weekend of glimmering celebration. I go to see my brother and sister, and to watch a dear one's rite of passage.
It is amazing how little I remember of my own commencement. We couldn't hear the speaker--a dear friend and mentor of mine, and a well respected professor. The monitor was never set up, for whatever reason, and we were left to sit on the stage in our rows, deaf to the words Leonard had carefully crafted for our sakes.
He even turned the podium around so we could see him. After all, the speech was for us, not for the hundreds of people gathered in the opera house.
One member of my row wrote "he sounds like he is speaking medieval French in a gigantic tunnel" on the sheet of paper we were passing around. We were getting hot, we were tired, we were ready to throw our mortarboards.
A friend gave me a video cassette of the ceremony, and for the first time, months later, I heard what our speakers had to say to us.
There was nothing particularly surprising about their speeches to us. They were smart and uplifting, encouraging and cautious.
But the beauty of it is this: Leonard, and the rest of the multiple speakers, didn't really have to say anything to us that day. We each spent years with them, sitting through classes, out to coffee, on trips all over the world. And in this slow and sure way, their lives were their graduation speech, and more than any graduation speech could ever hope to be.
My hope is that I will feel some of that while I am in Spokane this weekend.
