Tears in ... a Gymnasium?

I am a crier. I cry when I'm happy, I cry when I'm sad, I cry when I'm angry, I cry sometimes for no reason at all.

Ergo, it should come as no surprise that I cried like a baby at today's graduation, when my school's Class of 2011 flipped their tassels and became school alumni and students no longer.

While I was wiping away the tears for a group of kids that I know pretty well (it's a small school, so everyone knows everybody else ... but I've never been their teacher), it occurred to me what a mess I'm going to be this time next year. Why? Well, there are two reasons ...

First, and most importantly, Addie will be graduating. Fortunately (well, fortunately for her), her school is large, so the commencement is held in a large stadium at UNH. Addie will not be witness to me bawling like a baby as she passes what might be the last childhood rite of passage.

Members of the Class of 2012 at my school will not be so lucky.

I have been co-Advisor of these kids for two years now, and I taught them all Freshman English the one year I wasn't formally their Advisor. They are an incredible group of kiddos, and because of the nature of my school (I can't really express how small it is, and consequently how tight-knit), they are almost like surrogate children to many of us.

Addie's concert band played "Pomp and Circumstance" at her school's graduation last week, and she came home rolling her eyes at how people were crying (she may have given me a warning look at this moment in time ;-)). "Isn't it supposed to be a happy time?" my practical child asked. "Why cry?"

I tried to explain the whole rite of passage, the leaving childhood goodbye, last time a group that's been united for a long time thing, but she didn't get it.

One of her good friends graduated that night, and I tried to point out that watching Bob graduate must have been at least a little sad for her.

Nope.

For Addie, playing in her last school band concert with Bob was far more upsetting to her. She explained that picturing a band event without Bob was tear-inducing ... going through a school day without him, not so much.

So while I appreciate Addie's practicality, her ability to put things into a perspective that belies her age, I have personally cried at every single graduation I've attended ... and I can't seem to articulate why.

Do you cry at graduations, weddings, concerts, military ceremonies, and any sort of other formal event like that?

If so, why? If not ... why?

Oh, and congrats again to the Class of 2011 :-)

I'm Sorry, Kermit!

When I was seventeen, I hit a chipmunk on my way to work. It was the first time I'd ever killed anything in my life (I'm one of those people that catches a spider or bumblebee then releases them outside--the only exception is mosquitos), and I was distraught. I was such a mess, in fact, that I actually got sent home from work because I couldn't stop crying.

I've had other roadkill incidents since then, and while I always feel badly about it, I no longer go into hysterics. I mean, sometimes those squirrels just run right out in front of you. I always try to dodge them if possible, but sometimes there's just nothing you can do.

Something happened one night last week that reminded me of my utter devastation over the first chipmunk I hit, and it got me pondering the proverbial food chain and the equity (or inequity, I guess you'd say) of the animals, big and small, that are killed incidentally by human beings.

I live very close to the ocean, and there is a lot of marshland surrounding the roads near my house. Sometimes at night, you can hear the frogs singing, a beautiful choir that's obviously not planned but somehow sounds intentional anyway.

One night last week, I was coming home from dinner in Massachusetts with a friend. It was pretty late--bordering on midnight--and it had been raining all day and most of the night. All of a sudden, with no warning at all, the boggy road I was on was covered with frogs. Covered.

I felt a twinge of the girl I was at seventeen rise up inside as I realized that I was driving over frogs. Like, multitudes of frogs. We're talking froggie family reunion here.

I considered reversing up the road, changing direction, getting back on the highway, and going home in a way that would have allowed me to circumvent the avenue of amphibians. If I'd been seventeen, I would without question have done it. There were two things that stopped me:

1) I could see in my rear view mirror that the frogs that had escaped certain death under the deadly wheels of my car were hopping over their dead and injured brethren, bound for the relative safety of the moonlit marshes on either side of the road. They had avoided the wheel of fortune's death knell once, and it seemed cruel on a whole bunch of levels to reverse over them--I don't know much, but I do know that fate only goes your way so many times, and they'd already been scared and shaken.

2) It was very late, I was exhausted, and I wanted to be home as quickly as possible.

And so I plowed ahead, flattening countless frogs in the process because they were so prolific that attempting to dodge them was futile. For nearly a mile, though, I weaved my little sedan slowly around the larger gathering spots, avoiding sitting water because they really seemed to conglomerate in and around puddles on the road.

And I cried, not with the sharp and sudden agony of knowing that I'd killed a little chipmunk dashing across the street but with a longer, stronger awareness that the road was basically paved with frogs, that I did not want to hurt them and wished that they would hop off to froggie endeavors that would have kept them off the road, and that, ultimately, there was absolutely nothing I could do to change my undesired mass murder of dozens, maybe hundreds of frogs.

It occurred to me as I drove, trying to ignore the fact that the normally smooth road was characterized by scores of small but frequent bumps, that there were many metaphors to be drawn here ... and that none of them were happy.