There's a Sadness About Commencement

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
June 11, 1955



   THE MELANCHOLY season, for me, comes at commencement time.  I then have mixed feelings of sadness and deep humiliation,.  The time stirs a couple of memories I'd like to forget.  It also evokes sympathy for the kids who are graduating.
   It is a tough time, really, for those high school seniors who know so much less than they think they do and for the college grads who wish they knew as much as they thought they did in high school.  Both will find, as they always have, that they know too little.

   I GET the shudders every June recalling two experiences that darkened my high school exit.  It all happened in the long ago,
but time has not assuaged the hurt.
   By the sheer accident of sex I was president of my senior class.  The only other male in the group joined the class after the election.  The girls ganged up on me.  The big moment for the poor wretch who headed the class came during commencement week when he spoke at the alumni banquet.
   It was no big moment for me.  A trip through a meat grinder would have been a joy by comparison.  For two weeks prior to the ordeal I was beset by cold sweats--and, it turned out, with good reason.  My worst fears were realized.  The affair was a fiasco.  It branded me for life.

   MANY a speaker is able to stand before an audience and say nothing.  But he avoids embarrassment by talking.  This is a gift enjoyed particularly by politicians.  But a fellow who has nothing to say and can't even say that drinks humiliation to the dregs.
   That was my predicament.  After squeezing out "ladies and gentlemen" I went dumb.  Why I didn't pull the speech out of my pocket and read it I'll never know.  It may have been in my other pants.  So I stood there for two or three days amid salvos of silence and sat down.

   THIS harrowing experience came but a week after I had been taken over the jumps in the senior class play.  The Thespian ordeal was not as tragic as the speech because there were others to share it, but it was bad enough.
   Our director was a mathematics professor, a fellow steeped in dramatics about as deeply as the janitor.  He figured that if you knew the lines in a general sort of way you had the situation in hand.  Each character was allowed to interpret his role about as he conceived it and, with the loose direction and general horsing around at rehearsals, show-night found us ill-prepared to go on.
   But go on we did, piling snafu upon snafu.  The saddest happening came in act one.  A fellow who had been present during the opening scene failed to reappear at the appointed time, leaving me on stage with my aunt and cousin, the three of us trying desperately to make small talk while awaiting the departed guest.  The fellow rushed in five minutes late with his shoes untied.  The script had called for a change of clothes but he was either a slow dresser or had insufficient time.  Our director had failed to take account of this contingency during dress rehearsal, if any.

   IN ACT THREE, while saying sweet nothings to the heroine, I forgot my lines and glanced toward the wings for help.  Whereupon the prompter, none other than the good professor, laid another egg.  All he could give me was a sickly grin.  He had mislaid his copy of the play.  A couple of pages of dialog went overboard as a result but by this time nobody cared but me and my lady love.
   Such blights do not brush off lightly when you're young.  They sear the soul permanently.  Suffering is lasting in the green years.  When you're older you can shrug such trifles off.  You're resigned.

   BUT THE FOND memories of youth linger, too, just as the bad ones do.  Commencement time for most kids is the end of a happy journey, the severance of pleasant associations.  School friends may not prove to be your best ones, but they are friends apart.  First real pals are found in school  First love is found there, too, and first heartache and self-doubt and first fear of the future.
   And when you leave the halls of ivy the doubts and fears ride with you--while the friends go elsewhere.  You're on your own and that's how it should be.  Ahead is challenge and a new life.  But unless you're a fortunate extrovert there's a sickish emptiness in you and you wish you could have back those academic days.
   That's why I tend to sadness at commencement time.  I remember the empty feeling, too, along with that alumni banquet speech.


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