Here it is, May. Nice month. We could use one after this crazy weather we been having. Finally — spring flowers, sunny skies, kids counting the days until school is out, not hot enough for hurricanes yet.
There is only one thing wrong with May. Older kids graduate. And you got to go watch them do this.
Of course, you want to see your own kid do this. Or your own nephew or niece or godchild etc. strut across that stage. They earned it. But you also got to watch everybody else’s kid, who earned it too, but who you don’t know from Adam.
None of my own kids are graduating this year, but there are a couple cousins and a godchild. Plus, my nephew, my sister-in-law Larva’s boy, Leo Gunch Arai.
So there I am again, sitting politely — and screaming inside. My nephew has accepted his diploma and is sitting back down again. Nothing but other people’s kids ahead.
I have run out of acceptable things to do, like counting my teeth with my tongue
Then suddenly, this kid sitting next to me leaps up and blows his air horn because his brother graduated. Now, we had been sternly warned ahead of time — absolutely no air horns — before the ceremony started. So two ushers storm down the aisle and grab this kid to escort him out. This is my chance. I get up too and go out with them looking guilty like I had been sharing the air horn.
It’s real nice outside. The horn-blowing kid disappears somewhere, but I sit on the steps and watch the birds and the bees and wait for Larva and the family come out.
Then suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, I get this brilliant idea. It could revolutionize graduations of the future.
What you do is, in the last week of classes, the school videotapes each student, individually, walking across the stage. The kids set up appointments for this like they do for school pictures.
Each one is recorded accepting the degree or diploma from a hand that could belong to the university president or the school principal; each kid looks straight into the camera and thanks his parents and teachers, and then he strides off the stage
Then the school mails this video to the parents, and they don’t have to shame all the relatives they was going to shame into going the actual graduation of this one kid they know and 2,388 they never heard of.
No, instead of that, all the relatives get together at the parents’ house with snacks and drinks and watch this video. Five minutes, max. The actual graduate is there of course, so he can hear them all clapping and stomping their feet for him, right there in the comfort of home. They can even blow air horns without getting kicked out.
And they can play the video one or two more times, if the relatives are patient.
The school can even tape commencement speakers, if for some reason they want to. And the family has the option of speeding through that part of the video, which they will.
Now if I was a person who shot videos for a living, I would try to sell every school in the immediate vicinity on this and would become a national hero.
And I myself could say goodbye to other people’s kids’ graduations.
Later, I tell Larva about the idea, and she, fresh from watching a two-hour graduation, says I should go patent it.
But I don’t want to do that. For the benefit of humankind, I will pass it around for free. So here it is.
Just call me Modine Gunch, G.S. (graduation savior.)
