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Commencement is start of adventure
By Carl Heintze
June is a month for commencements and I went to two. The first was to see my son receive his master's degree in software engineering. The second was to watch my oldest granddaughter graduate from Los Gatos High School.
Thinking about these two commencements got me thinking about how far removed I am from either of these two events.
When I got my own master's degree, software engineering had yet to be invented as a major subject. In fact, software and how to make it hadn't even been dreamed of. My degree was in journalism and to gain it I pounded away on a typewriter; type was "hot" and set on linotype machines, and computers were nowhere to be seen in my chosen profession.
When I graduated from high school it was in a country town, the principal (who had been in an automobile accident that day) mistook me for someone else when he handed me my diploma, and the only person who kissed me in congratulations was someone else's mother. (She may have mistaken me for someone else, too, for all I know.)
For a celebration, three other graduates and I drove to San Francisco, heard Ray Noble and his orchestra at the Rose Room of the Palace Hotel, tried without success to find a place that would sell us a drink and drove home again. There were no freeways and not many cars on the road at 5 a.m. when we finally got home.
I'm not sure what the graduates of Los Gatos High did this year to celebrate their commencement, but I have the feeling that going to San Francisco and the Palace Hotel would be pretty tame stuff. My granddaughter has already been to London and Washington, D.C., places I only vaguely thought about when I emerged onto that football field.
So I am in a strange place when it comes to commencements, not in the middle, but a long way from either of the two I witnessed this month. They both seem a long way off. Indeed, thinking about my own commencement from either high school or college is depressing. Many of my classmates at either institution are gone.
Not long ago, for instance, I spent an afternoon with a second cousin who was in my high-school class browsing through our annual. To our sorrow, we found that most of our classmates have departed this earth for other places.
I didn't attend the 50th reunion of my journalism class, but I understand only about a third of the class was well enough, or alive enough, to make it.
With all this in mind, I got to thinking about what I might say if, by some strange circumstance, I was asked to give the commencement address at a graduation. I'm not sure why I speculated on this. No one has ever asked and I can't think of any reason why they should.
But I do have some thoughts from the vantage point (or maybe it is the disadvantage point) of looking back on my own two comparable commencements.
So, graduates, here it is:
No matter what you think your future in the world is likely to be as you emerge into it, your guess is probably wrong. Be prepared for the unexpected. You probably won't get the job you've been thinking about, or, if you do, you won't keep it very long. Very likely, you won't marry the person you think you're going to marry, you won't live where you think you would like to settle and your life won't turn out like you've got it planned.
If that sounds daunting, don't be depressed about it. Actually, one of the wonders of entering the adult working world is the unexpected. You're going to find things as unlikely as software engineering is to me.
You're going to meet people you never expected to know. You're going to live in a world different than the one in which you were a child and very probably you're going to face challenges you never expected.
And it's the unpredictability of it all that eventually will come to impress you. You'll be ill prepared for some of what happens to you. But much of what you have learned will have a lot to do with how you live.
You'll get congratulations from those you don't know now. You'll keep some of the friends you've made in school for life, but others you'll never see again. You'll have triumphs and, I hope, not too many tragedies.
You'll find life is much shorter than it should be and that on the whole the world is a pretty wonderful place. I'm telling you this because I don't think anyone really told it to me. Even if they had, though, I suppose I would have ignored their advice, much as you are going to ignore mine.
You might save this, though, and look at it 50 years from now to see how right I was.
Congratulations, welcome to the world; it wants and needs you. Good luck and God speed.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
