It’s Another Graduation Summer
We’ve made it to July! The household has settled into the peaceful, restful rituals that only July has to offer. Teenagers sleeping until noon, children eating something at all hours of the day so that the kitchen is never truly clean, endless bickering over who’s turn it is to play video games because even though there are FOUR video game systems in the house, both boys only want to play the system his brother is playing. Afternoons spent making and decorating cupcakes, of which, on Sunday, Joanna’s beloved dog, Finnegan managed to get twelve of them out of their container and eat each and every one. That’s right, sprinkles, frosting, paper cups, all eaten. Nothing thrills that dog more than the forbidden cupcake. So, May and June and the frenetic end of yet another school year are distant memories, and all things to do with the most recent high school graduation are fading as well. My oldest daugher, Liz, graduated two years ago, and quicker than you can dye that encroaching gray ou of your hair, daughter number two has followed suit. Bittersweet, yes, but it’s really more bizzare than anything else because it just doesn’t seem possible that two years have gone already and my mind refuses to compute the reality at hand. Daughter number three will graduate in another two years, and that one will probably kill me.
In order to attempt to process another high school graduation summer, I felt that a graduation shopping and lunch extravaganza was in order. Nothing helps one deal with those milestones that life hands you like whipping out that debit card and hitting the highway. So, beginning in the second week of June, Joanna and I were able to launch into the proper spending money respite. This wasn’t an everyday thing, the Trumps sadly we are not, but every few days when rewatching much loved old movies had run it’s course, we’d hit the road to shop for “the basics”. That’s how every unnecessary shopping trip must be justified when shopping trips go into overdrive. If we didn’t convince ourselves that we were genuinely after “the basics”, we could be plagued by guilt that could last for hours, maybe even into the next day. So we barricaded the dogs in the upstairs hallway (two baby gates, one saxaphone case, and a folding chair strategically placed on and around the top stair) and took off. Two nearby towns contain the indispensible Target, a department store, a breathtaking shoe store, the Yankee Candle store, and perfectly acceptable lunching establishments.
For nearly three weeks it was all about blowing way too much money and mushroom burgers and caesar salads and raspberry lemonade and dodging thunderstorm after thunderstorm. On one excursion, the blowout shopping trip to end all shopping trips, really, we drove an hour away to do the mall. We shopped most successfully, we lunched on pasta and bread and salad and attempted to beat the latest storm back home. Well, that didn’t happen. Beating the storm, that is. We’re going along, listening to Joanna’s Ipod, it’s all good. We’ve bought some swell summer dresses, five altogether, three of them earmarked for her graduation that Saturday. One dress for the big day is for me and two are for her. She has to have two for the day so she can pull off a change of dresses at just the right time in the course of the day. This is especially important because her graduation day is also the day of her eighteenth birthday. How excellent is that?! She gets to fully treat the day as her own little Oscar night celebration. You know, one amazing dress for the awards show and another for the after parties. Very, very Cate Blanchett and Mariah Carey. Except that she’s actually covered up unlike Mariah Carey who consistently confuses attractive with barely clothed.
Anyway, life is good on this particular day until we realize that up ahead the sky is an alarming shade of gray. Or, rather, death eater black. So, there’s no turning back, there’s no place to pull the car over, it’s just rushing headlong towards the portal of hell. We could even see the demarcation line of the storm, so cartoon-like vivid you would’ve thought it was computer generated ’cause there’s no way that solid line of wind and rain could be real. We hit the wall of storm screaming for all we’re worth. Joanna claims I was the one doing the screaming, and the swearing, and the wailing, but I’m sure she did her share. And if I was more vocal and a teensy bit more freaked out, fine. I was allowed because I was driving and trying not to hit something and pleading with fate, or whatever was out and about on that day, to not drop a funnel cloud on top of the car. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time, if ever, I had to drive through something that intense. The pickup truck behind me (fortunately the only vehicle in the vicinity), his headlights slowly disappeared as I inched my way along. I have no idea where he went. Joanna felt the need at some point to tell me that wouldn’t it be beyond tragic if we perished on that road just days before her birthday AND her high school graduation. Uh, well, yes, that would be bad, truly rotten, but why are you even talking to me about such an awful thing when I need all my concentration to avoid hitting trees and fences and buildings and other cars and, quite possibly farmhouses dropping out of the sky. Don’t want to get hit by one of those.
Eight white knuckled minutes later, we realize the rain is getting lighter and I allow the speed to start climbing from it’s snail pace of five miles an hour. The music gets turned back on and we revel in that lovely little rush of coming through something vicious unscathed. As we get closer to home, we hit those pockets of destruction that thunderstorms like that leave behind. The road ahead looks clear, and then you suddenly come upon trees down and sagging power lines and creeping traffic. The tornado warnings come off and on well into that evening but we fortunately get nothing like what we drove through that afternoon. A very hot, humid graduation ceremony comes and goes on Saturday, and Jo turns eighteen and becomes all grown up. The dresses were perfect for the day, and she partied with friends until the wee hours of Sunday morning. We fearlessly continued our shopping quests for the next couple of weeks, still trying to outsmart the occasional thunderstorm, largely succeding, and getting caught in nothing nearly as ghastly as that mall afternoon. It’s summer on the east coast, after all, and you really can’t let potential storms stop you from shopping for those “basics”.
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