Chinook
by George Hosier II - May 19

Graduation Daze

Graduation day is a much anticipated rite of passage. While in the throes of starry-eyed youth, humans establish certain dates as demarcation lines of maturity and good fortune. Graduation isn’t the only one, of course, but it’s one of the last and most significant of the magical dates that lure a youthful imagination with the siren’s call of unprecedented freedom and banished sorrows.

It’s a little difficult for me to remember back that far, but from what I can reconstruct; my first goal was to successfully celebrate my 10th birthday. Nothing was going to be cooler than double digits! I would be transformed from a little kid, to a savvy “tween”. It came as a disappointment to discover that when I awoke on the morning of my 10th birthday, I felt exactly as I had the night before.

I attempted to stifle my unease, reassuring myself that the metamorphosis would happen during the party. That day, I nearly drove my mother to a homicidal act with my pestering. “When are my friends going to come?” “Can I have a little taste of the ice cream?” “I wanna breathe the helium from a balloon so I can talk like Alvin the chipmunk.” “Can I open just one present before the party?” “Why is your face so red, Mom?” “Why are you flexing your fingers like that and staring at my throat?”

As I recall, she eventually gave me an ultimatum. I was to stay in my room and play with my Tinker Toys until the party, or she was going to call my friends and tell them the birthday was postponed until further notice. I tried not to laugh incredulously. I couldn’t figure out what would make her say a weird thing like that. I mean, I was only 9...er, make that 10 years old, but even I knew that a birthday was only valid on a certain day each year. Perhaps the mystical tween wisdom was already infusing my skull. I suspected I was becoming a child prodigy!

Graciously, I acquiesced to my Mother’s ridiculous demands. She had taught me that it was rude to make fun of people stupider than me, so I pretended to accept the premise that birthdays were arbitrary events that could be chosen at random like a visit to the park, or a lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Besides, as much as she seemed to actually believe the drivel, I had no doubt that she was capable of some irrational act, like making me wait until the following year to turn ten. I thought it best to retire to my room until party time. After this brief, exhilarating peek into mature thinking, I certainly didn’t want to jeopardize the mother lode of coolness that would be arriving later that afternoon.

The day ended anticlimactically. I never did experience the moment of epiphany which indicated that I was officially no longer a little kid. The nearly paralyzing swoon of disappointment put me so out of sorts that I started a food fight with my cousin which degenerated into a full-fledged brawl. It took a tactical squad of mothers wading into the fray, twisting ears and swatting behinds to break it up. Most of my guests left crying.

To make things worse, Mom had evidently not yet recovered from her attack of acute illogic. She demonstrated this by confiscating my birthday presents for a month. How was I supposed to know that she had used her best china plates to serve my cake on, and that they wouldn’t bounce off of the tile floor, like my favorite cereal bowl? She had never bothered to tell me that she’d even been to China, for crying out loud!

The tweens didn’t turn out to be nearly as glamorous as I had expected. I quickly realized that I had miscalculated the correct date for my deliverance. It now became clear to me that the actual birthday of significance was my thirteenth. How I longed for that day. Surely becoming a teenager would reward me with the elusive panacea for my boring life of mediocrity. Alas, it was not meant to be.

As a matter of fact, that particular milestone on the road of life concealed the edge of a precipice. I never even saw it coming. Howling, I toppled awkwardly over the yawning edge, gangly arms and legs akimbo, to plunge into the dripping quagmire of adolescence. My face erupted with a bumper crop of hideous purple zits the size of fishing bobbers; my voice developed the rich, melodious timbre of a duck with laryngitis; and all over my body, hairs began emerging from hibernation. It was a ghastly three years of misery as I groped and wallowed frantically toward the only beacon of hope; my sixteenth birthday.

Not only did sweet sixteen finally arrive, it struck me like a sledgehammer’s blow. Instead of relief, I discovered that there were hardships attendant upon the rights and privileges of sixteenhood that made a purple zit on the end of my nose seem like a beautiful thing in comparison. It was in my sixteenth year that I wrecked my Dad’s pickup and discovered the meaning of the words “liability insurance”. It was in my sixteenth year that I fell madly and helplessly in love and was cruelly jilted—at least once a week. Perhaps worst of all, it was during my sixteenth year that I was initiated into the sadistic torture ritual known as trigonometry.

I think it was the trigonometry that coaxed me to overcome my cynicism toward miracle milestones and to gamble all my hopes and dreams on one final, glorious moment: high school graduation. I could look back at my previous expectations and understand how unrealistic and illogical they had been. Of course there was nothing magic about a particular birthday. Anybody could understand that. But graduation was different.

For one thing, there would be no more trigonometry rituals. More than that, there would be no more school at all. If the completion of twelve years of forced child labor didn’t represent a literal transition point which would inevitably bring significant lifestyle changes and a newfound freedom, then nothing could. I was confidant that graduation was indeed the magical moment of personal renaissance that I had been seeking for all these years.

As the time approached, people began asking me annoying questions about my future plans. Future plans? The whole reason I wanted to graduate was that I wouldn’t have to plan anything except hunting, hiking, camping, fishing, and snow machine trips. Where was I planning on going to college? Were they daft? I was about to escape from a dozen years of mandatory education! Why on earth would I voluntarily subject myself to four years more?

The way I had it figured, it wasn’t going to cost much to buy gas for my Dad’s boat or ATV and to keep myself supplied with fishing tackle and ammunition. I could mow lawns, stack hay and shovel snow to meet those expenses. If my parents kicked me out of the house and told me to get a life, I could live in a tent in the woods and eat cranberries, rose hips, salmon and ptarmigan. When I shot a moose, I could jerk it and live on that for a year. When winter arrived, I would build an igloo and trap beaver.
I’d have everything a guy could need.

Everything, that is, except a woman. That bothered me a little, but I knew that eventually I would meet a gorgeous, intelligent, witty, talented, stylish woman who would become smitten by a grizzled mountain man who was a master of the ancient art of wood lore, could field strip a 30-06 with his eyes closed, could spit through his teeth and hit a spruce cone at thirty paces, and who emanated the quaint woodsy aroma of a pair of sweaty sneakers that has been in the bottom of a gym bag for a month

She would find no greater pleasure than to sit at my feet looking up at me with big, liquid, adoring eyes while she sharpened my axe or knitted me a sweater or just sang love sonnets to me in that angel’s voice of hers. She would never gain a pound or a wrinkle, a hair would never be out of place, and she would be the world’s best cook and most efficient housekeeper.

Yes, indeed. Life after graduation was going to be great. All my troubles were about to be over! Once that diploma touched my fingertips, the shackles would fall away, and I would be reborn. I nearly flunked my senior year daydreaming about it.

The bitter disappointment I experienced after graduation cured me once and for all of any fantastic notions of magical dates or demarcation lines. Evidently nobody else shared my vision. My parents told me that if I wasn’t going to college, I wasn’t going to, as they put it, “mooch off of them”.

They claimed that if I wanted to be my own boss, I was going to pay my way. Then they started pulling expenses out of thin air. They charged me rent for my own room and made me pay for any gas I used. It was when they said that I was going to have to buy my own insurance and clothes that I realized I was going to have to get a job.

That decision represented the relinquishment of my fantasy that maturity and freedom can be achieved by waking up on a particular date. After I had worked through the grieving process, I gradually began to realize that my life actually could change for the better if I set goals and worked hard to achieve them. It dawned on me that there were indeed perks to graduating, but they had nothing to do with escape from responsibility, and everything to do with the begrudging work I had managed to put in to earn my diploma.

Then, quite unexpectedly, one day I woke up and realized that I had matured, and with that maturity had come a certain freedom. I’m content now in that freedom born of responsibility and hard work—at least as contented as I can be expected to be until I retire. I’m looking forward to retirement. It will solve all my problems. I won’t have to work anymore, and I’ll spend my time hunting, hiking, camping, fishing, and taking snow machine trips.
 

Index of Chinook Articles