Grad Night, Part 2

We had our final official event at St P’s last night: the graduation of L’s 8th grade class.

We got a new priest a little over a year ago after our long-time, very popular priest retired. The new guy has received a decidedly mixed reaction. As I’m not Catholic I won’t get into the details.

That said, homie knocked out the Mass in 40 minutes, which I fully support.

The graduation ceremony afterward went well. It was nice to have it be “normal,” since C’s in the spring of 2021 featured limited guests, masks, and families spread out with pews between them.

Neither M nor C won any awards at their middle school graduations. I had a feeling L might get one this year. It helps that her class is tiny. But she’s also been a straight A student and consistently gets the little awards and acknowledgments teachers hand out during the year.

She was nominated for four awards that we know of.[1] She won one, and it was a good one: the Holy Cross Values award for Cathedral that includes a $500 scholarship and automatic entry into class leadership at CHS next year. Pretty, pretty good.

That was one of the awards where they did not read off the nominees. The grads were sitting in their own section and we had a direct view of her. I had a decent idea she was going to win this one, so got to see the surprise and delight on her face when the principal called her name. She was beaming when she walked up to receive it.

So that was pretty cool.

There is always a brief reception for families before the adults leave and the kids have their final dance together. Several of us parents went to a bar to have a few drinks during the dance. I cracked up that, for most of our 90 minutes at the bar, the moms were all on one side of the room and the dads on the other. Some things never change…

L went to a friend’s house to hang out for awhile afterward. When I picked her up at midnight she said the dance was fun, although nobody was dancing. She was wearing casual clothes her friend had given her after they got to her house because, “I was tearing it up on the dance floor to try to get other people to dance and got my dress all sweaty.” Apparently there was twerking involved.

Just because the class of 2023 had graduated didn’t mean she stopped being a leader.