Grad fad gets personal

Posted Jun 16, 2009 by Mike Winter

Updated Jun 16, 2009 at 06:30 PM

My daughter has graduated preschool. Her mother and I are very proud. It was a long, sometimes difficult journey, but all the hard work has finally paid off. I don’t like to brag, but she has minded her “p”s and “q”s and learned her “d”s from her “b”s. She can count up to 20 without skipping over twelve or sixteen and knows both the capital of Florida and how many sides a hexagon has. (The number of sides a heptagon has is, however, still open for debate).

I admit, I was a little dazed on the day she took the stage in cap and gown to receive her diploma. They grow up so fast. It seemed like just yesterday she was a precocious five-year-old obsessed with “The Wonder Pets,” making it across the monkey bars in one try and polishing her sticker application skills, preferably on a sensitive and expensive piece of electronics. Of course, it WAS just yesterday. But now that my daughter has her degree, or diploma, or is it a certificate? – well, whatever it is, it’s on vellum and therefore entirely legal and valid – I expect her to step up and embrace the lifestyle all self-respecting recent graduates assume. This entails intensive afternoon cartoon watching, reminiscing about “the time Scooter got his head stuck in the terrarium” and mooching off her parents while putting out “feelers” for job leads.

For a person yet to enter kindergarten it’s an impressive start. Much better than my unproductive early years. I frittered away the first five years of life hanging out at the house with my mother, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, taking naps and scattering Tinker Toys across the far reaches of the living room. I was, for all intents and purposes, little more than a savage. I couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t tell you if the world was flat or round. It’s a minor miracle I could walk upright and grunt my name.

Shameful as these admissions are, it doesn’t end there. The worst of it is: I’ve only graduated two times in my entire life. Two times! There was the little shindig I attended after successfully completing high school, and another one four years later when I earned my bachelors degree. That’s it. My daughter is already one ahead of me. Last year she graduated from beginners swim school (it was a lovely ceremony with music and medals and a giant dancing seal throwing inflatable pool toys at whatever moved), intermediate swim school (same basic ceremony, but with more splashing) and now preschool. At this rate, she will have donned cap and gown somewhere between eight and 28 times – depending on how far she pursues her swimming/gymnastic/horseback ridding/haberdashery interests – by her 21st birthday.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m all for building self-esteem and a sense of accomplishment in kids. The children in my daughter’s graduating class seemed to really enjoy their time on stage. There were songs, plays, speeches (all mercifully short) and an inspiring round of “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Apparently twenty years from now everyone will be either an astronaut or a ballet dancer. Or an astro-ballet dancer.

And the parents certainly enjoyed seeing their kids sashaying across the auditorium, especially the mom who brained me with her telephoto zoom as she leapt past to record her son accepting his diploma. I just hope the scraps of scalp I left imbedded in her lens didn’t screw up the auto focus. After all, an event this special only happens once every few months.