Commencement is my Life

I was wearing a T-shirt today that said “Commencement is my Life”; I silkscreened the calligraphy onto a white shirt a couple of years ago. Among other things, I’m responsible for making sure that 500 graduate students and their faculty go across the stage next Thursday in the Recreation Hall at UC Davis in an orderly manner; that the 70 or so volunteers show up and make this happen; that there are enough chairs, not too close together to impede movement nor too far apart to overrun the space; that the faculty who say they are going to show up to get their PhD students hooded in fact do so and go to the correct side of the building; that the food for the volunteers, food for the orchestra, food for the police, and food for the guests and students gets to where it needs to be in time; that students have their academic dress on the right way around and the correct names on their reader cards and an adequate pronunciation guide of their name in case it’s needed; that guests not place themselves and others in mortal danger by hanging over parapets with tripods. I’ve never been a mother but I imagine this is what it’s like to have several children under the age of five.

And yet….

It’s not quite true. Commencement isn’t really my life. Certainly, the graduation ceremony does occupy an inordinate amount of my time at work these days, but it will be over soon. To be honest, I was tossing and turning at three this morning, but it wasn’t because of commencement stress; I was mentally composing an essay in response to our first collective “Bloggers of Place” assignment (see the Ecotone Wiki, Collective Blogs). I did get up. I did write the essay. And now I can sit and watch it percolate (it’s not due until June 15, but who knows what my life will look like between now and then), while the last few stragglers (“I don’t really want to walk at graduation but my mother wants a picture”) beg for late, atrociously late, admission, while the details of who hands out programs (which of course omit the names of the atrociously late) and where the sign language interpreters stand and what the Dean says (which depends on what the Provost says) and where the bigwigs sit and what position the flowers take and how to explain to the conductor that no, we can’t have the orchestra fill the entire auditorium, because there are nine hundred people that have to file past it—take up my day to the point of breaking.

I’ve been thinking hard about place. My heart has been in Venice today.