Graduation – My 10 seconds of fame

A time to laugh.  A time to cry.  A time to smile, and embrace that this day is indeed your own.  Such is how many naturally embrace graduation, be it from high school or the one that I’m to have in roughly 5 hours, college.  To be honest, I felt no euphoria when I finished my last class.  I felt no euphoria when I knew I was going to pass my classes and graduate.  I felt no euphoria when I saw my name on the clearance list.  The only word I can come up with is relief.  It’s over.  I’m going to become a Morehouse Man, and get my degrees (PHILOSOPHY and Spanish).  And even now, as I type this, I feel no extreme euphoria, the type of which I expected to feel when I finished my work.

I acknowledged this strange emotion, and I think it exists because I didn’t come to Morehouse or college period to pussyfoot around and not graduate.  The ultimate purpose of college is to graduate.  Get out and become a productive member of society.  Well I’ve been a productive member of society and on one hand, being proud I’m graduating is being proud I can wipe my ass – you don’t get proud of doing what is expected of you.

But maybe I’m not giving the situation or the circumstances enough justice.  I’m in the minority – a black man with a college degree.  While I may have expected it, my family expected it, my peers expected it, perhaps the world at-large didn’t expect it.  As much as I downplayed it all, no matter what this is an accomplishment.  To me, it’s more of a step than a finish, but nevertheless it is a step in the right direction.

As the big day readily approached, and I was out with my friends for the last time as an undergraduate, I never stopped and thought to myself that these days are over.  I never reveled in the inherent nostalgia of meeting these good men and women for the first time.  I lived in those moments, which are now done, and my memory of living is what holds those moments together.  But I never had some sort of excitement about it all.  Maybe I’d long since accepted that this is what happens when you graduate – you pack up and leave town, because whether or not you made a mark, your time has come.  And you must move on.

Then my family came into town, and something powerful started to overwhelm me.  Seeing my aunts and uncles smile, my parents gleam with pride, my brother simply say, “I’m proud of you,” and 50 of my family come down from St. Louis on a bus just to see me walk across a stage for 10 seconds provided me with a swell of pride in my heart that I’d never felt before.  All eyes were on me, and I didn’t know what to say or do.  Seeing them Saturday evening and spending some 6 hours with them, having drinks and shooting the breeze, it hit me that I’m the man of the hour.  That they came to see their hard work fulfilled by watching that 10 second strut across a stage on Morehouse’s campus.  And I was determined to have them enjoy themselves.

So the prior feeling of listlessness left me, and my tired body (I hadn’t slept in 2 days combined with a good amount of drinking in those two days) dragged itself to campus at 6:15am Sunday morning.  I put on my cap and gown, and looked around at the 450+ men who were about to graduate with me.  The sight truly is something to behold, and as we began our processional, the excitement I’d been waiting on came.  As I made that last walk from King Chapel down to where the ceremony was held, right across from Graves Hall (my freshman dorm), my body started to shake a little bit.  I saw the banners of the different classes who came back, people who graduated in 1969, 1954, 1944, and more.  They stood smiling, proud to see more Morehouse Men enter the world.  And that euphoria was arriving.  Slowly but surely, as we marched past Benjamin Mays’ grave, and the sea of people were surrounding us, I felt it.  As I write this now, I still feel it in my heart.  The combination of happiness, euphoria, pride and joy created a harmonious note of finality to my Morehouse and college experience.  And as I sat through Cicely Tyson bringing out the Jane Pittman and Henry Louis Gates taking 15 minutes too long, my legs started twitching.  It was almost showtime.  And I would not want to disappoint.

I’d told Ed Coffie, a friend of mine, that I’d come across the stage with the pride, power, and exuberance of Shawn Michaels in 1997 (obscure wrestling reference #2).  And since the stage had its own Titantron-looking thing, I was just that much more excited.  When I stood in the short line to get up on the stage, I felt the jitters.  I felt those nerves.  I felt the impending moment about to happen, if that makes any sense at all.  My 10 seconds of fame was coming.

Shawn Michaels as Champ in 1997

They said my name, and I hopped up those stairs, put my right hand in the air and yelled, “Let’s go baby! Yeah!”  The eruption from my 50-deep fan club shocked the crowd near them, and my comrades gave a large yell as well.  One hand shake later, I was a Morehouse Man.

It was my 10 seconds of fame.  It meant so much to so many, and to them I say thank you.  For those of you who will one day have your 10 second walk, enjoy it.  One guy did the Ric Flair across the stage, finishing it with a “WOO!”  Because your 10 seconds of fame is the best 10 seconds of your life.

Flair and his trademark WOO

I once thought that graduation was like losing your virginity.  Everybody hypes it up, there’s so much talk about what’s going on, then the moment comes and goes.  I’d forgotten the deeper goings on in losing one’s virginity.  That moment can never be replicated.  Your memory of it will be a jumble of emotions and events, regrets and successes.  But the importance of that moment will always stay with you – in that time period, you did something you can never do twice.  And one time is plenty.

Shout out to all college classes of 2009.  May we go forth and do big things.