A few years back, I opined on graduation and related ceremonies in my part of the world. That time has come around again; in the town where I live, the one small high school is having its graduation tonight, with just shy of sixty young men and women sitting and listening to some local-esque luminary for entirely too long before listening to one of their own and crossing a stage, shaking hands, getting a piece of paper, and tossing eminently uncomfortable hats into the air. Many of them will go to some not-too-far-away school elsewhere. No few will be getting severe haircuts and weeks of being yelled at before some years of being shot at. Some will stay more or less where they are, doing what they have been doing but more of it. While most of those will probably be back in the area, a very few others will drift away and not be seen again hereabouts.

I had thought that I would be among the last when I walked across a somewhat larger but more confined stage close to twenty-five years ago. (I still maintain I shouldn’t’ve done it. Lots of hassle and expense for no real gain and even less comfort.) I had thought that I would leave and not return, and I did leave instructions that I was not to be contacted; I was a bitter young man or older child, and, if I am being honest, I remain far more bitter than I probably ought to be. (There are others, certainly, who have more cause to be more bitter at this point in the year.)

Circumstances have not been such that I could achieve that youthful goal–or most of the goals I had at that point in my life, really. I returned to the Hill Country, not only for visits on college holidays or the occasional evacuation in advance of a hurricane coming in, not only for visits to families for celebrations and solemnizations, or to show grandparents the one of their grandchildren I helped to make, but to live. I don’t live in the town where I grew up, not at this point, but I’m not too far off from it, a drive of just over an hour (because I have to go through small towns to get there, and I know where the speed traps are set up), and if I’m not back there as often as some might prefer (although, if I’m still being honest, more often than some might like; I’ve been quite the asshole to more than a few people), I’m in plenty of contact.

I have to wonder how many of those walking their stages tonight or in the next few days, or who already did so (as is the case for another small town in the area of which I am aware; I expect it’s not alone), set out with similar hopes, that they will not be bound anymore by who they have been and had to be, and will find that those hopes do not come to pass, that they are, in fact, who they have been and that they have been where they seemingly ought to be. I have to wonder, too, how many of them will achieve what they dream to be true and will find that it does not fulfill them. But I think, perhaps I hope, that more of them will find what they want and find that they do, in fact, want it.

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