Graduation Robes

Looking out the office window on Graduation Day, the whole campus is all peopled with black-robed scholar types posing for photographs alongside their big-grinned parents, all of them making sure the insane fountain outside my office is in frame. I haven’t learned the official title of this fountain, but in my brain it has been nicknamed, “The Fountain of Supreme Aquatic Chaos” and/or “The Fountain of Insane Horse Attacks and Greek Demigods”.

BUT ANYWAY:
From this distance, the robes these jokers sport today appear to me as 100% legit and these people seem like Important Wizards whose daily goals hold grave consequences for the collective fate of the Man. But I happen to know from FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE that in wearing one of these Wizard Robes, legitimacy is not the most salient feeling at hand. The robes are paid for on your debit card and picked up from the Campus Book Store, shrink-wrapped in plastic along with the cardboard hat that is also called a “Mortarboard”. You stand in a bathroom putting it on and it feels like polyester, plasticy and flimsy – above all else, fake-feeling. You do not feel at all like an Important Wizard Whose Personal Narrative is like a Bible of Explosions and Triumph but instead like a dweeb in a Halloween costume.

MEMORY:
Wearing one of these robes before my own graduation, in the basement of the Temple University Gymnasium and Aquatic Center. The ceremony would later be held upstairs on the basketball court. In the locker room, a place which I remember had an acute redolence of human poo, I helped my grandfather out of his wheelchair so he could use the bathroom. Several months later, he stopped using the bathroom and eating altogether and disappeared into the wild blue somewhere of outer space (meaning: he “kicked the bucket” as they say). But at that time he still was around enough to need to use the bathroom and still “not around” enough to require some help. Maybe caught mid-stride in a hokey-poky between this place and the other place. Still, he seemed totally impressed by my Wizard Costume and I am told that he cried when I accepted my diploma.

OTHER MEMORY:
Fully Capable Grampa picking me up from school when we had half-a-day and driving me to his house and cutting up a hotdog into manageable pieces and sitting his his chair watching “The Price is Right”. Yelling COME ONE at the TV sometimes. Lots of sequins on the TV, I recall.

OTHER MEMORY:
The distinct and totally audible *POP* sound of my grandmother’s lips kissing my grandfather in his coffin, sounding like an auditory punctuation mark. This is the type of memory that one is compelled to write bad/unsuccessful poetry.

AND:
I think it’s probably okay not to feel like an Important Wizard on and Important Mission, so long as we resolve to remember/understand that there is real and insane/amazing wizardry all around all the live-long-day and that we are engulfed in this wizardry. We need only to take pause and appreciate the grave and wonderful subtlety and when we listen closely to the quiet we will hear the Great Cosmic Wizard saying over and over into infinity: “TADA! TADA! TADA!”