It’s the time of year again when I think about graduations, rites of passage in a set of subcultures in which I participated for a long time (and still have some part, somehow still hanging on despite the many changes to my life and work that have occurred in the intervening years). I’ve written on the subject a time or two, I know, and I’ve written on similar observances before, as well.

It’s more toward the latter of them that my thoughts turn as I sit, pecking away at my keyboard to make the pixels shift and dance on the screen in front of me. My daughter, Ms. 8, has just completed her fifth grade year. In our local school district, that completion means that she has finished elementary school and will move on to middle school (here, grades 6-8). At the same time, a number of her teachers and administrators are heading off, not for summer sessions and continued schooling, but for other jobs entirely, and there are changes upcoming at the school to which she is bound; a new campus is set to open with the coming school year, with all that entails. But I’ve talked about that before, and recently; I’ll not rehash it (much) here.

I will note, though, that there have been many things marking the coming shift, the leaving behind of childhood as childhood (because there is a difference between being in an environment where most of a peer-group is prepubescent and being in one where more people than not are in the grips of hormonal upset). Ms. 8’s school did a good job of offering closure to the outgoing elementary schoolers, sending them off with hope and acknowledgment; I am glad that she got to have such things, and I am glad, too, that she is the kind of person who is open to receiving them. Not all do, and not all are, not by any means, and some of those who say they aren’t in the moment say so only because they don’t, or don’t fully.

I hope that Ms. 8 looks back on this ending with fondness. I hope that she continues to feel, as she has told me she does now, that she is loved, not only by her parents, but by those in whose community she finds herself. And I hope that she continues to be so much herself as she has hitherto been–because she’s a pretty damned good person, and I’m proud to have her as a daughter.

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