The day has finally arrived for Katie to walk across the stage and accept her diploma from Enloe High School marking her forever more as an Eagle alumnus.
If that statement right there doesn’t take your breath away (if not provoke a tear or two!), I honestly don’t know what will!
If nothing else, the stark truth of some advice that my mother gave me over two decades ago right after her older brother Nicholas was born has really come home to roost (pun intended):
“Don’t blink. Before you know it, your kids will be graduating from high school…”
Yep…I blinked. Oh boy, have I blinked! And my mother was right on target as it’s really hitting me harder than I’d ever imagined possible. If you were wondering, she also warned me about that bit of joy from this process as well. It turns out that experience really does matter!
When it’s Katie’s turn to try to resist blinking, I can only hope that she heeds that sage advice and cherishes every moment, every second, every instant of her journey as the precious thing that will never come her way again but in a choice bit of irony from the universe will always be with her to guide and hopefully comfort and cheer her.
Over the past month, Katie wouldn’t necessarily admit it but I think she was definitely nervous about the approach of her graduation ceremony.
To be sure…her making it to graduation was never in doubt. She’s graduating cum laude with the Enloe Scholar’s Award and is already looking forward to a career in the law that has been her consistent dream for many years now.
It’s the how she came to graduating with honours that tells the true story of Katie and why I’ve never doubted for an instant that her future would be successful and hopefully full of joy bringing her talents and more importantly her heart and caring that’s at least ten sizes larger than mine could ever hope to be to a world in desperate need of them.
Anyone who truly knows who Katie is at her very core knows that she is both the immovable object AND the irresistible force of that proverb and that there is nothing on this Earth (or anywhere else for that matter) that will stop her from achieving whatever she sets her mind to doing.
Some might well argue that part and parcel of that would being genetically endowed with more stubbornness from multiple generations that most could imagine and that’s certainly part of her formula for success.
But when you get right down to it, Katie has had more challenges and obstacles put in her path toward today’s graduation ceremony than many would or could imagine, not the least of which would be her being one of her brother Alexander’s fiercest advocates who would always be the one helping look after him and making sure his needs were taken care of and that she was doing from a very early age.
She has never had it easy.
Ever.
It should come as no surprise that if you ask her which of her high school courses were the most memorable, I can guarantee you she’s going to answer PEPI (Physical Education Pupil Instructors). This course has students designing lesson plans in various athletic activities and then actually teaching these lessons to groups of special education students of varying physical and intellectual abilities.
What may not be in the course description is the relationships that she’s developed through her years in PEPI where it’s clear that she dearly loves all of the students she worked with in PEPI…not the least of which would be her own brother Alexander!
Coach Buzek recently pulled me aside during a PEPI trip to “Field of Dreams” in Wake Forest (this is a friendly softball outing played between schools where the teams are comprised of students with special needs and the students help them bat, field, run the bases). She had nothing but glowing things to say about how Katie’s journey from her first year in PEPI started where she was rather shy and in the background to becoming one of the most fierce proponents of the school keeping that class as an elective as well as one of the most caring amongst the leaders who could be depended upon without question.
That wasn’t a surprise to those of us who know her best!
Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who deserve it.
Headmaster Albus Dumbledore
Katie may well have never had anything come easy but that didn’t stop her from making attending to her studies look like a doddle to the outsider looking in who didn’t see how hard and diligently she studied no matter what other activities she might have been engaged in such as dance, tae kwon do, or lacrosse or just dealing with the challenges of every day life like puppies and older brothers (I’ll leave it to your imagination which one was more vexing to her at times!).
I can count on the fingers of one hand and probably have a few left over the number of times I actually asked her to attend to her studies pretty much throughout her school career to date. Other than the odd question every now and then when her teachers would be carpet-bombing updates to the online grading system (and occasionally fat-fingering who they were assigning a grade to), Katie just got on with taking care of her studies.
Help was always on offer and goodness knows she certainly deserved it but she rarely asked for much more than a permission slip to do some field trip.
She’d have been forgiven for allowing her senior year to be an opportunity to take a breath and just cruise through the final course requirements and just enjoy the year.
If anything, her senior year was arguably the most strenuous test of her endurance and abilities to multi-task.
She ended up taking half of her classes through Wake Technical Community College for college credit and they had college-level expectations in addition to rigourous courses to finish off her graduation requirements.
That would be enough for most people but not Katie who also got a job at Target working in their Starbucks location and becoming arguably one of their most dependable and hard-working team members in relatively short order.
You might think that loads of work at school and Target would be enough but she also seriously considered doing her senior year playing for the school lacrosse team she loved playing the two years prior (and like in PEPI had a similar experience of going from being the quiet and shy one to being one of the leaders on the team who after she scored her first and only goal on attack in the last game she played then gave up her spot in the attack in the second half so her then-senior friend Miss Heidi might have a chance to score a goal of her own in her last game).
Even without taking on lacrosse (which as sad as I know that must have been probably was the right choice at the end of the day), she’s managed to do well in her courses…none of which were a real pushover “bird” course.
And she did all that largely on her own through her own force of will and stubbornness.
This is why I truly believe she will be successful in whatever she chooses to do…whether it is arguing cases in court or if she decides to do something completely different that ignites her passion and caring for others that she already has in full measure.
If she’s able to get her foot in the door, may God help who is on the other side of it from her. They have no chance withstanding the immovable object and irresistible force that’s coming their way and preventing her from accomplishing whatever goal she has set for herself.
So it’s my hope that she will celebrate today and cherish the good memories and friends she has met in her journey at Enloe.
May she forgive these tears of joy from her father who has loved and cherished this truly special human being who walked across that stage and accepts her diploma as well as the challenges of the next stage of life at college that’s coming for her this fall.
Oh, and try not to blink! 🙂
