Graduation, Interrupted

I am back home again, with my husband and younger son, after a trip to see Paul graduate from Syracuse University. For the last few days, I have been reassembling my sense of myself at home, secure in the comfort my household gods: my weighted blanket; the crackling radio from which I hear the sounds of 24-hour sports talk; the bed that suits the curve of my back; the garden that has grown wild after six days of almost constant rain. There are also, of course, household dogs, who have amped up their affection in their anxiety that we might one day leave home again. In the morning, before I get out of bed, I greet individually the three of them that are splayed tummy up around me; the sound of my voice beckons the fourth dog from where he is sleeping with my older son. He too turns his tummy to the ceiling for our morning ritual reinstalled for the first time in a week.

The trip—and the return—did not go according to plan in small ways and in more dramatic ones. After some discussion my husband and I we had decided to drive one last time the 1600 miles between Houston and Syracuse—and back again with Paul’s belongings. The trip would be all-too familiar: Paul had done it alone several times, Scott and Paul had done it together, and we had done it as a threesome. Sometimes Paul would have his dog, sometimes Scott and I did the Southern part of the trip several times, meeting Paul as he churned his way down to Louisiana or to Tennessee without stopping overnight. None of us had done the whole trip both ways—there was always a car to drop off, and, besides, there was never enough time. This time there would be. Our semester was over; we could submit grades from the road and work in hotel rooms. There would be ample opportunity to stop at sites of interest. 

“Interest” is of course in the eye of the driver, and sometimes, by courtesy, the passenger. I never was a long-haul driver, preferring the local distraction to efficient travel. I am the one who will suddenly turn for an exit that promises “the biggest peach in Georgia” or a petting zoo with the smallest ponies in the world. When we were young and still collecting the china that now so burdens us, my husband and I would sometimes end up driving part of this route, spending hours in Tennessee antique stores in Sevierville, near Dollywood, where we would also eat apple dumplings at the tiny Applewood restaurant. Now my husband is gluten free, the Applewood restaurant is a thriving enterprise with a gift shop and an hour-long wait, and Sevierville is all themed motels and souvenir shops. 

Mysteriously, despite giving ourselves an extra fourth day, and despite driving above the 70-mile-an-hour speed limit of much of the Southern portion, we had no time to see anything. Some of this was miscalculation: desperate for coffee, we took a too-early exit in Virginia and wasted a precious hour in a boarded-up (and apparently caffeine-free) town. Another few minutes on the highway and we could finally see Natural Bridge. We did stop at an antique shop in Tennessee, where I bought two nineteenth-century apothecary bottles the owner had found on a beach in California, tumbled smooth by the Pacific. Beckoned from the route by a giant three-dimensional crawfish sign, we stopped to eat in Beaux Bridge, Louisiana. This time we were a little belated; we had passed up the more famous restaurants east of Lafayette. The crawfish and shrimp were good, but we were disappointed to discover that this was the same place we had stopped on the last iteration of the trip, having made the same mistake.

Perhaps we were running out of time, simply because, well, we were running out of time. Perhaps we were too old to drive until the early hours of the morning, emptying out the next day for itinerant pleasures, accidental tourism. Or perhaps—and this was cheering—we were still too young.  When we are older still, retired perhaps, or simply demented, we might have time to wander before our children rein us in for our own good.

After four days and three nights of failing to wander, we reached Syracuse with two days to go before Paul’s graduation. Entering the city, I also began to feel the pressure, which rises up occasionally, of being what I can’t help thinking of as a “normal parent.” The rituals of and around commencement serve as something of a capstone for that desire for normalcy and highlight departures from its parameters. As of our departure from Houston, we had not yet downloaded our graduation tickets, and had utterly failed to make dinner reservations for any of the nights we would be in Syracuse. I imagined other parents, younger parents, mothers in capri pants, having planned the weekend months ago, perhaps, despite pandemic-related confusion, even scoring a table for a post-ceremonial Sunday brunch at which they would entertain their child’s best friends. We did our best from the road, coming up with two 9 o’clock dinner reservations. I had, at the last minute, actually found some capri pants that to me signal unobtrusive motherhood, and had actually remembered to pack them. They were wrinkled from the drive, but  I am told wrinkling in linen is acceptable and even encouraged. I hate to dwell on those pants, but they are for me part of a wardrobe of slightly mysterious garments that signal even in their compound names, specific occasions and particular relations to femininity I have labored to understand: luncheon suits; dressing gowns; gardening gloves. As I write the names of the garments, I hesitate about whether to hyphenate them: cover up, hostess pajamas, yoga pants. If I cannot write these words correctly, can I wear them properly or at all?

I could do nothing about the fact that we were “older” parents, except to wear what to me were youthfully (and painfully) high heels when meeting Paul’s friends. I could do nothing about the fact that, as a professional commencement attendee (and in later years a professional skipper of the ceremony) I hate graduations and everything about them. I hate the music, the speeches. I hate the gowns and hoods that glow with color and the ones, like mine, that are very dull indeed. I hate the high-quality gowns that faculty have spent good money to buy, and the paper-thin polyester rented ones (like mine) that get thrown into a return pile when the ceremony is over. I will not speak of the hats except to say that they do not work with women’s  unless you have the skills and the locks to make a neat chignon.  I hate when innumerable students cross the stage, and hate it more when they do not and must be recognized (blessed?) in large groups. I hate the heat when a graduation is outdoors, and the claustrophobia and ugliness when it is indoors. I hated my own graduation, which took place soon after my father died, and the graduation of others, even when those others are my beloved students. (I make an exception for the beautiful and intimate doctoral hooding ceremonies that Rice and so many other universities have developed in the last decades). While I love talking to parents about how wonderful their sons and daughters are, this is not--I repeat NOT--part of commencement ceremonies, in which parents and students only meet by accident as professors stop to tear off their robes and now their masks. 

By Friday of graduation weekend after the first night in our favorite hotel, I had put these thoughts aside to become not a professional but a parent. Although we still had not uploaded the tickets into our mobile wallets, we had dinner reservations at good places, and were looking forward to seeing Paul’s apartment, and even to cleaning it and loading his things into the car. We would shake our heads as parents do when we saw the dirty grout in the bathroom and felt the stickiness of the kitchen floor. We would treat him with the gentle irony of stories swapped among mothers, and would make it clear how proud we were of him. We would have time to meet his friends, provide snacks, and drinks, wear unremarkable clothes that would somehow remain unsullied by our scrubbing and mopping.

These thoughts now belong to a time before the car accident less than two miles away from Paul’s apartment. Our car leapt into the air, and landed 15 feet away; as it twisted, the light turned oddly, deeply pink. When everything stopped, we were in the new world that arises suddenly after an accident: first, the checking of the body, the recollecting of the self, and then the reassembling of a mundane world unraveled in a moment. We were extraordinarily lucky; we were not hurt, and neither were the people in the other car. The pink light was not, as I vaguely thought it might be, blood in my eyes; it came instead from the side air bags which descended as we were struck at more than 40 miles an hour. I remember thinking when we spun to a stop how delicate the air bags were. Not the balloon-like excrescences of the front air bags you see on tv, they reminded me in color and texture of women’s undergarments from the 1960s, those slips and panties described variously as “shell” or (revealingly) “skin” pink.  These frail and fluttering things had done their protective work, although I am sure the “incredible side beams” about which the Subaru salesman had boasted when we bought the car had as much to do with the fact that Scott and I--especially Scott who was driving--were alive and well, and that I am able to write this entry from my desk at home.

It probably took a while, but our logistical minds took over. Telling our sons without panicking them. Contacting the insurance company. Towing the car to a body shop. Renting a car. Getting a vaccine validation for graduation. Making it to the restaurant for dinner. Cleaning Paul’s apartment in time for the landlady’s “inspection” the following day. Bystanders and first responders came and went, not quite believing, as they saw the car, that we were OK. “We’re fine,” I would say, and then, to explain why this wasn’t quite the case, “We’re 1600 miles from home.” I think I said this to every one of the people who came to help or inquire. They would look at the undamaged Texas plates and at the crushed driver’s-side doors and nod. 

Slowly, the logical world came into focus around us from the screens of our undamaged phones: we began the insurance process, we gathered our belongings, got our car towed to a Subaru dealer not very far away. We were left standing by the curb with a policeman, as I tried with shaking hands to access my never-used Uber app. I teared up when officer offered to take us to a nearby rental car agency-- and again, when we discovered that Enterprise was out of cars on graduate weekend, when he offered to take us to the rental center at the airport. We sat in the back of his police car in the hard plastic seats designed for suspected criminals. The drive was just long enough for me to remember to be polite: “how do you like being an officer?” I said. It was also long enough for me to regain my curiosity, when he spoke of the “difficulties of the last year.” “What do you think about all that?” I asked, following him into euphemism.  “I think the media focusses on the bad instead of the good” he said. He was certainly good to us. I have no way of knowing, of course, if he would have been equally helpful if we had been people of color, younger, less obviously a middle-class couple. Sitting on that hard back seat where others had been restrained or handcuffed, perhaps after an accident like ours, I conjured parallel worlds, the sliding doors of privilege. What if we had been uninsured? Black? Hispanic? Young? Tattooed? Injured? Dead?

As we fit our belongings into our rental car and drove back to Syracuse, the “what ifs” followed at a discreet but palpable distance, trailing behind the car like a cloud or a just married sign. By the time we reached exit 18, the one for the Syracuse campus, we had not so much recovered as reentered. I was the mother of a graduate again, although one considerably less worried about her clothes. Like other mothers and fathers, other middle-aged people, all over Syracuse that day, we mimed shock at the messiness of our son’s apartment and set to cleaning it. We remembered our own filthy undergraduate apartments, and I, at least remembered how my own mother had sprayed and scrubbed as I looked on unable to see the dirt she was so insistent on getting rid of.  Scott and Paul packed up boxes to ship in case we had to fly back; I started in the kitchen, scrubbing, wiping, disinfecting and polishing in a parody of hover-mothering. As I knelt to scrub a particularly recalcitrant spot on the floor, I thought to myself, “I have never been this tired.” A few minutes later, I realized this was not true. I felt, as I battled dirt and brain fog, just as I had after Harvey. Funnily enough the realization made me feel at least 20 percent better. This was not Harvey, and I still had an intact home even if it was 1600 miles away and I was not sure how and when I would get back to it.

We made it to dinner that night, clean enough for a celebration. We made it to graduation the next morning and went through the vaccine validation process in seconds. Somewhat unexpectedly, we had remembered both to bring the good camera and to charge it. It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that a parents-eye view is different from an academic one: my eyes filled as we saw Paul’s name on the screen, and when we identified him through our telephoto lens--an unmistakable dot in a sea of other less significant dots. My husband climbed over the empty seats in the sparsely populated stadium to take pictures of Paul as our son listened and stopped listening to the speeches, took his cap off and put it on with the tassel in the wrong place. Once the ceremony was over, we begged Paul to take selfies with us, ignoring the horrifying things selfies do to anyone over 35. All around us, parents in capris and parents—for there were some—in more idiosyncratic clothes were begging their children to do the same. We—young parents and parent figures and older ones alike—would all look almost equally bad: squashed, elongated, droopy and double-chinned. The graduates, of course, would shine despite it all. It was their medium and their day.

Nothing will fully reconcile me to Pomp and Circumstance, or indeed to pomp and circumstance, but perched on orange cushions, masked and socially distanced, I surveyed the field at the Carrier Dome for the dot that was my son with love and gratitude. The pandemic, which had changed everything for my son’s cohort, was almost over. The accident was behind us. We had all, in our different ways survived.