Commencement Soap Bubbles

As I was wandering around campus trying to keep up with Ann last week, I realized that my nephew Sam’s graduation from Washington University was the first commencement ceremony I’d been to in a long time. For a while, I thought the last one I attended was my own from Vanderbilt—Friday the 13th of May, 1983—but later I remember attending my old friend Tom J’s graduation from UT Austin in May 1988.

The commencement speaker at the UT event was TV journalist Bill Moyers, who gave a good speech, though I can’t remember a particle of it. As for my own graduation, I don’t remember that there was a special commencement speaker, but there must have been. Which only confirms what anyone who sits through such a speech knows, that they have the longevity of soap bubbles.

Wash U invited Richard Gephardt, former Congressman and lead-balloon candidate for U.S. President, to be the ’05 speaker. I heard him as I might hear parts of a televised speech as I entered and left a room. Ann saw no reason to sit with the rest of us at the back of the quadrangle on one of the folding chairs provided by the university, so she set off to explore. I followed. She managed to find a set of exciting outdoor stairs—hard concrete, so I was sure some tumbling would come of it, but none did—long academic hallways (heavy doors, office-hour notices, bulletin boards, cartoons taped to the walls), an elevator usually reserved for the handicapped, sidewalks, grass, a group of commencement volunteers who cooed over her, and a basement with university workers in their cubicles, who were ignoring the thousands of people only a short distance away. In one hallway near a door leading to the quadrangle, paramedics were attending to a woman in a stretcher. She must have been about 60, a mother or grandmother or aunt or some other relation of somebody among the crowd, or all of those things to scattered members of the crowd. She was conscious and talking, so I expect she survived whatever it was that got her temporarily laid up.

As I said, I didn’t hear all of Gephardt. But as near as I can tell, his speech came down to, “time flies, things change.” Here’s something that won’t change: this man will never be President of the United States. Never mind his politics. He just doesn’t have a presidential name. It was the same thing that sidetracked the late Paul Tsongas in 1992 in favor of Bill Clinton.