~a column by Colleen O’Brien
For a week, I have been the Jet-Setting-Grandma-Attending-College-Graduations-Across-the-Country. I am now temporarily at rest, far from home but no longer living out of a suitcase. Whew.
The jetting around was worth it. I was privileged to see two of my grandkids graduate from college within a week of one another; one in Ohio, one in Idaho, two such different places.
Ohio, seventh in population in the U.S., is one of the most urban of our states, with more towns than any other as well as more big cities; it is farmland, rivers and trees, a northern border of big lakes, home to a few presidents, settled via the Ohio River when the country was very young — 1803; now, full of people, roads, interstates, people, people, people.
Idaho is the 39th state in population, has one big town that is barely a city and a few little towns with less than a thousand people; it is high desert, then soft rolling hills, then craggy mountains, fast rivers and a vastness not seen in the middle eastern states; there is more sagebrush than folks. It has produced no presidents yet, was not a state until way after the Civil War (1890), is wildly independent.
Both of these beautiful states are so conservative the very clouds have a crimson tint, and despite the pride of state that its citizens have, the diversity in both states is encouraging, for it is like the differentness between my two grandkids marching around gymnasiums wearing the exact same funny hats and gowns, accepting a piece of paper from a guy they know only slightly, along with a lot of other kids who from the bleachers look like rows of matching monks.
The diploma from the prez of their institutions proves their individual hard work and diligence for the past four or five years. Now that they’re done with it, they will come to love their alma mater in a way similar to how they loathed it when they had to get up for 8 o’clock classes, write endless papers and take one exam after another. What they’ll remember are the friends, the parties, the one or two excellent professors. The torture of having to learn something they know they’ll never use if they had six lifetimes ahead of them fades. And someday they will be surprised when they actually use that algebra as they attack a fixer-upper project in their first home.
The less than half a decade of drudgery will seem slight when they’re much older and longing for the simple life of college compared to the complex and worrisome adulthood they’ve been gaining on for some time.
One of my grads is a girl, one a boy. One grandkid is military, the other leery of guns. One is a sports MVP, the other an academic. One is tall, the other not. When they were little they played together a lot because they lived in the same town. For a decade they lived across the country from one another and drifted apart. Perhaps they will be friends as they mature, perhaps not.
We look at photos of them now and see us in them – “Oh, she looks like me!” “Oh, he looks just like his granddad at that age!” I’ve heard the other grandparents say the same thing. The older they get the more like themselves they look, with an elbow here, a forehead there resembling someone. But it is the character traits and personalities of us elders that are now theirs that amuse us. How could he have that expression on his face when he hasn’t been around his granddad since he was eight? How can she roll her eyes just like her aunt who’s lived far away for some time?
If we look like our ancestors, we also act like them — are able to throw the ball, write the poem, prefer to read or mow the lawn, be friendly or reserved. . . it’s all of a piece, all of a piece of the families that made us, that we have made.
I’m proud as the grandmother of two handsome and brilliant and talented kids, but really, as one of the parents said at one of the graduations, “I’m proud for you, not of you; you can be proud of you because it is you who have done it. I would be proud for you whether you flipped burgers or invented something new if what you were doing was what you wanted.”
So, my dear grandkids, be proud of yourselves and know that Gramma Collie simply thinks you’re both the most talented as well as the nicest grads I know.
Three rules: Be happy. Be kind. Text your grandmother.
