The powerful drumming of graduation

The Column: 05.12.25

I flew to Duluth Saturday to an enormous hockey arena to watch my tall handsome grandson in his black robe and mortarboard walk forward and accept his college degree and what made the long trip and the boring ceremony more than worthwhile — essential, imperative — was to witness the delight of his girlfriend, Raina, sitting next to me in the high bleachers, her focus on the processional during “Pomp and Circumstance,” her cry of “There he is!” and out came the smartphone for video and as he crossed the stage to get his degree, she whooped and yelled and hopped up and down and so did I.

More important than a college degree is the love of a good woman, and seeing this elegant funny well-spoken willowy woman in the long dress in love with him and he with her — I would’ve gone to Alaska to see it, Auckland, Tuscaloosa, Turkestan.

A circle of Ojibwe drummers beat and chanted before the procession, very thrilling after the obligatory announcement acknowledging that this had once been their land — but what mattered was the reverence of the chanting and the power of the drumming, interpret it as you will. To me it stood for the spirit of these young lives, our prayers for them, setting forth into a technological jungle, a perilous trail beset with profound confusion, fascist tides that have elected a deranged president not once but twice, and the ever-present odds of tragedy and suffering, but the drums urge us onward, onward, don’t look back. Next to that, “Pomp and Circumstance” is a tea party under a striped canopy.

Thanks to hockey-arena acoustics, the speeches were almost entirely unintelligible, not so much English as the burbling of pigeons and chittering of squirrels, with words like “journey,” “accomplishments,” “discovery,” and “curiosity,” and the whole sentences I heard might’ve been composed by an older AI-powered speechbot but it didn’t matter, the day wasn’t about the bigwigs but about us, and video cameramen circulated among the Class of 2025 and their close-ups were flashed on a big screen and people whooped and screamed when they saw their graduate.

My graduation back in medieval times had no video, we just sat and listened to the college president say he was proud of us — his intelligence was as artificial as most college presidents’. I wasn’t proud of myself; my scholastic experience was highly mediocre. I went to college in order to avoid getting a job I’d hate, such as dishwashing or parking cars. I knew what I hoped to do with my life — had known since the eighth grade — and for the most part I’ve succeeded at doing it for the past sixty years but the college degree and the career were two separate entities having little to do with each other, like granola and granite. Or vermicelli and Vermont.

In Duluth I sat through the mind-numbing reading of names and my mind drifted toward the dark side, college pals who got locked in comfortable jobs and couldn’t get out, friends who got entangled with alcohol and drugs, the tragedy of cousin Lynn who stopped at a stop sign, the sun in her eyes, and entered the highway to be crushed by a truck, Corinne who dove in the water with pockets full of rocks, the tragedy of Freddie who loved all living things and crashed into the stone wall of depression, cousin Roger who dove into deep water to impress a girl forgetting that he couldn’t swim, and then Raina cried, “Here he comes!” and there he was, approaching the stage.

He was a new man, not the Charlie I had known. Under his black gown he wore a suit and tie. He wore black shoes. His wild hair had succumbed to a barber. He’d been a camper and canoeist, an outdoorsman, and now he was a model for Nordstrom’s or a candidate for Congress. Raina rose and Charlie’s mom and aunt and uncle and me the old guy and his name was spoken and the words “Graphic Design” whatever that may mean, and we let out some wild whoops like a goal had been scored in the closing seconds and the trophy won.

A moment later she said, “Let’s go meet him” and we descended the stairs to the concourse and there he was. She flew into his arms and he held her close and there’s the story. Lord, thank you for your generosity. True love in the midst of pomposity.

In Cheerfulness, Garrison Keillor shares witty reflections and personal stories that make a case for staying upbeat in a world that often pulls the other way.

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