Congratulations to “Ty” and the entire class of 2025
By Kathryn Ross
Graduation is coming up this week and over the weekend. At the end of the month, across the county around 370 kids will be walking down the aisle to their high school bands or orchestras playing “Pomp and Circumstance.”
I don’t envy them. These kids are walking into an uncertain future and a world full of strife and anger. I hope they find the love and compassion this world also offers.
I can’t begin to tell you the number of graduation ceremonies I’ve attended over the years. On graduation weekend alone, I attended at least five ceremonies each year – Belfast, Fillmore, Friendship, Genesee Valley and Bolivar, as a reporter. The one graduation I didn’t attend was my own due to the fact that I didn’t pass my Regents Chemistry exam. By one point. It’s a failure and embarrassment I lived with for years, until I realized it only bothered me.
Out of all these graduation ceremonies I have attended, the one thing that has always amused me is the sentiments expressed by the valedictorians and salutatorians in their speeches. They tell their classmates they will never forget their high school years and each other because it is the best time of their lives.
But for most of us, they weren’t the best times of our lives. They were days full of doubt, meanness, distrust, angst and tears, and triumph, pride and friendship. They were both difficult and satisfying days.
Which is why I think that many of us are not eager to attend our high school reunions until we reach over 25 or 50 years out from graduation day. What I discovered is that when we finally do get to a class reunion, we end up sharing a beer or a glass of wine, not with our high school classmates, but with our grade school pals. We sit around and reminisce with them before we approach the kids we were with in high school.
I want to tell those valedictorians and salutatorians that 10 years, let alone 50 years from their graduation day, they’ll be lucky to remember who sat next to them in biology class, who stood beside them in choir or marching band or underneath the basketball hoop or on the 50-yard line and they’ll be hard pressed to recognize them.
High school is dramatic, soul sucking, rewarding and triumphant. It is a time that is both good and evil and it is a time that gets better the farther away you get from it. Grade school is less traumatic and a time when everything is new. By the time you get to high school everything is geared towards getting out and getting on with your life. I’d like to tell the valedictorians and salutatorians don’t be so sure of yourself, but then this is their time, not mine or ours.
This year my Great, Great, Great Nephew Tyler will be putting on a graduation robe and marching across the stage to receive his diploma.
It’s a graduation I want to attend, but probably the only one I won’t be able to.
I pray that after graduation that all his dreams will come true, whether or not they are my dreams for him or his family’s dreams for him.
To me Ty will always be the baby I filmed coming into the world, the little boy I walked down the street with to watch a house being built. He will always be the boy who ate the frosting off my cake, the imp who took the little girl behind the tree at Music on the Lawn. He will always be the boy I played catch with and took to story time at the library. And he will always be the little boy who learned he could be an artist.
I’ve watched him hit the ball, pitch the ball, catch the ball and run the bases from the time he wore a size 4 sneaker to the size 13 he wears today. He is not number one. He is number 11.
The best part of all is that while Ty is a great athlete, a great student and a great person, I know that as the years pass by, whether he is on a baseball diamond or running a business, he will be a great man.
Happy Graduation Tyler, and to all the seniors crossing the stage this weekend across the county – congratulations.
