The weeks leading up to graduation meant a lot of work for us seniors. It seems like there are so many hoops we have to jump through in order for us to walk across the stage that would be set up for us at the football bowl.
The first step was to order our caps and gowns. At commencement the previous two years, the boys' gowns were orange and the girls' were white. Orange was the main color for our school. I had hoped that those in charge would have realized by now how ridiculous those orange gowns looked and would let the boys wear the traditional black. We got our gowns and they were ORANGE! NOOOoooo! Years later, my Mom had a bunch of my stuff, including my graduation gown. She asked me if I wanted to keep it. I kept the tassle, but threw the cap and gown in the trash. (I had kept my college gown, which was black, but I don't know where it is now.)
(Three years later, Loyd graduated. The boys in his class got the black gowns. I was very jealous.)
Along with the gown, we got our graduation announcements. Mom and Dad had a list of people I had to send the announcements to. Many of them were people I had never met before, like their friends from college that they had managed to stay in contact with.
However, almost everyone I sent an announcement to sent back money. I had received a total of $200. (Back then, that was a lot of money. I explain this in tomorrow's post.) The only problem of course was having to write thank you notes. This was even harder than Christmas and my birthday because I was getting stuff from people I didn't even know.
Another issue was that I needed a graduation partner. At our school, the girls get to ask the boys to be their partners. I didn't realize it at the time, but this is such a big thing that some girls actually line up their partners during their sophomore year. Mom was concerned that if I didn't have a partner, they were going to pair me with another boy, and she didn't like the idea of that because it was going to look weird. (Actually, we had more girls than boys that year. We had girls paired with girls, so there was no way I was going to get paired with another boy in the first place.)
(A side note: The graduating class of 1980 had more girls than boys. In 1981, a couple of girls thought that was going to happen again, so they requested to be partnered with each other. But that year, there were more boys, so they forced them to pair off with boys. I want to point out that these girls were not lesbians, but they were trying to create a stir. This is why Mom thought I was at risk of being put with another boy.)
I had no idea if anyone was going to ask me to be their partner. I remember the year before, one of the guys graduating was pre-arranged to march with one of the hottest girls in the class. She had graduated after the fall semester. That is, she completed all the requirements to graduate and did not have to return in the spring. She sent notice to the school that she was not going to be at the official graduation ceremony, but she did not notify her partner. At the last minute and without warning, he was paired with one of the least desirable girls in the class. (He probably would have preferred being placed with another boy.) I was afraid this was going to happen to me. I really didn't want to appear to be that big of a loser.
One day, I was walking around the halls before school. Three girls I knew were gathered together. One of them saw me and said, "Oh, there he is!" She said, "Fayd, we're lining up our partners for graduation and Mild here wants to know if you'll walk with her." I don't think I spent too much time thinking about this. I had known Mild since the ninth grade. I remember her coming into my Typing class after she had moved to Artesia and she sat in front of me. She was not undesirable, but she was not really a good student, so I didn't pay much attention to her. However, I did have respect for her because she was not a Drud. In that brief moment after being asked, I knew I wasn't going to do much better than this, so I said, "Yes." That was one more thing out of the way.
The only problem with Mild asking me to be her partner was that my Mom got it in her head that we should be dating. I wasn't going to do that.
In the next post, I'll go into detail about the local scholarships. This was perhaps the most bizarre part of the graduation experience.
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