No Day But Today

Mrs. Wabeke told me never to start a paper with a dictionary definition, but it only seemed fitting to site Merriam Webster today. Graduation is the act of acceptance of an academic degree or diploma.

Never have Merriam and Webster been more off their mark. Graduation is much more than a simple ceremony, it is the culmination of 12 years of work, friendships, and the little moments that still make us smile.

High school was more than its name leads you to believe. It wasn’t just school, it taught us a whole lot more than how to write a good essay, who laid the foundation for communism, and why we all should despise geometry proofs.

High School taught us about love, life, work ethic, and how to be a person of substance, all of which might be more important than knowing what started World War I. Before we can move on, we must reflect. These have been four long years. We will cherish the good moments we have had here, games, dances, spirit days, lunches, musicals, field trips, and other countless extra curricular activities. When we look back with our rosy retrospective, these are the moments we will remember, besides in 20 years who really is going to remember how much stress their freshman bio exam caused them.

We all came in this school together. We were a mixture of nervous, excited, and scared because this was an entire new world for us. Sure we may have been scared by the size of the building or we might have gotten lost on our first day, by the end of our four years, we had it all figured out. Its just our luck, the year we figure out the quickest way to each class, which hall has the coldest drinking fountain, and what is actually edible in the cafeteria, it is the year we have to leave and start this all over again.

We will leave this school tonight, together again in the mix of nervous, excited, and scared, because just as we came in with a blank slate, we leave with one. Get used to it, most of us are once again back on the bottom of the totem pole.

Morgan Freeman’s character in The Shawshank Redemption says, “These walls are kind of funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, gets so you depend on them.” Of course, he was referring to prison, but it applies here. I guess Jenison High School was our little prison. We were told when to eat, when to go outside, and when to go to the bathroom. All kidding aside, for some, this place grew on us, and for these, as myself, today is bittersweet. As much as we may have loved this place, it is time to go. We finally are free.

Tonight is our last night together as the class of ‘04; tomorrow we will go our separate ways. Some to college and some to jobs. Some we will see randomly at Meijers or on our respective campuses and some we will not see again until the reunion.

So do not let tonight be plagued by the coulda, woulda, shouldas. This is the last night to connect, to bond, to share a few laughs, and a few tears. We don’t have the chance to redo it all, it happened, its over, and we're all better for it. If anything, make tonight the best night of you high school experience. In the song “Another Day” from the Broadway Musical RENT, it is most poignantly put, “Forget regret or life is yours to miss.”

Tonight we leave here with everything we have crammed into our heads in 18 years. What will happen in the next second is unknown to the best of us, but the best pieces of advice I can give to you tonight are:
1. Go out and be happy. Regardless of what you do, strive to be the best and happiest teacher, mechanic, doctor, actress, author, rock star, whatever, you can be. If living in a box behind the 7/11 makes you happy, then by all means do it.
2. Don’t take anything or anyone too seriously. A good laugh every now and then will keep you sane.
3. Don’t waste time. As Mrs. Johnson often says, today is the last June 3, 2004 there will ever be, so get excited, and cherish the time you have.
And most importantly,
4. Don’t forget to thank the people who got you here, your parents, your friends, and most of all your teachers. Over the past few years, teachers were the few you have spent more time with than your very own families. Whether you believe it or not, they really do care. They might show it by simply asking how your day was, coming in early or staying late to help you, holding a thousand reviews before the A.P. test, or letting you turn in your paper a few days late because you have had a lot on your plate and needed a little slack. There are many of you teachers here to whom we owe unending thanks and gratitude. It would simply take to long to list all of you individually and why we are thankful, but I wanted to let you know; you make me and so many others proud to be your students. Not only have you taught us millions of facts, events, and formulas, you have taught us about ourselves. There is an old Chinese Proverb that says, “Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.” Well, you can let go of my hand today; I am ready to enter that door.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Thank You.

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