A colleague treated me to an eat-all-you-can lunch on the last day of February. There were many reasons for his kindness and generosity but there was one that summed up what March, the month, is all about. The last day of the shortest month for this year marked the day they were to change the prices of their offering. Starting March, the owner with the tone of a priestess officiating a shift in season, informed us, she will increase the price for our gluttony. Those were not her words, but she seemed to despise the fact that people go there to eat until their stomachs are bursting.
This was her reason: March is graduation season, more people eat outside and so I will up the price.
I am not an economist, but I thank my fate I am not. I do not have to deal with the mystery of supply and demand and the countervailing values of sweet charity.
Indeed, what is graduation season? What is this time that capacitates some individuals to slowly move up, to silently become bigger and important.
Words trick us by their long usage.
When graduation comes, people move up the ladder of learning and accomplishment or move out of an institution of learning. This is a ritual preceded by two main speeches: the valedictory address and the commencement speech of the guest speaker.
If valedictory address is to say good-bye, then the person who delivers it need not be at the top of the graduating class. That person must just be one who excels in bidding farewell. Does this make sense?
In the many graduation exercises that I have attended (for they are called “exercises”), the valedictorian is usually an honor student. In many schools, the valedictorian may not have the highest grade but must be an honor student. The valedictorian is selected from among the rank of honor students, with outstanding achievement in the so-called extra-curricular activities.
In many universities, there is another person who delivers a speech, a “salutation”. In the old tradition, the salutatorian is expected to deliver his or her speech in the language of the Classics, usually Latin or Greek. In this age, though, the salutatorian is the second to the valedictorian. In other schools, we do not hear even the salutatorian speak.
The honor saying farewell is the honor given to the valedictorian. It is a simple act, but on the day of the Graduation, the act of good-bye comes with the gesture of gratitude. This, however, is not the rule. We have across in modern and contemporary times, valedictorians who are asked to stop speaking because theirs is not a fare-thee-well talk but an indictment of the school from whose life their medals and honors come from.
Why damn the “Mother of your Soul,” the alma mater? It is because such label has merely retained the form and not the content. Schools do not necessarily nurture and, thus, for the enlightened honor students, the good-bye can come with confession, contrition and condemnation.
What is a graduation without a speaker, he who is called to commence everything? This being is expected to be full of himself. Usually a politician, for learning institutions who desire political connections for reason only they can fathom, the commencement speaker is, by practice, one who can talk forever. Their reputation is preceded only by curriculum vitae that, in length, can assume a vita of their own. The person given the task to introduce this guest speaker should be prepared to be embarrassed, because after he finishes the introduction, the guest speaker will inevitably scold him for mentioning everything. It follows, however, that the guest speaker himself has sent in the bio-data that can biologically usurp all notion of humility or self-effacement.
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Image credits: Jimbo Albano