There came a time, some years back, when the good people at Our Lady of Pompei, the Roman Catholic high school in southeast Baltimore’s Highlandtown neighborhood, were kind enough to invite me to address their graduating seniors.
This was maybe 20 years ago, when the world was changing pretty fast. And some of the backgrounds of the kids were changing, too, which is the great vitality of America even if it sometimes frightens us.
Southeast Baltimore used to trace its roots mainly to Eastern Europe. On this graduation night, a teacher leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Watch this,” at a Mass preceding graduation exercises.
Half a dozen kids, of varying skin tones, read homilies. They read them in their native languages, not only English but Spanish, Greek, Italian, Polish and Arabic. A meditation in the big church contained a prayer chanted in Hebrew.
It felt as if a whole world had dropped gracefully in on Highlandtown and formed the great American quilt.
This is a lovely time of year for those lucky enough to witness any of these school graduations, where the rituals seem lit from within.
The parents sit there with their rush of feelings. There’s pride in their kids graduating, yeah, but also this gnawing anxiety: did they really absorb all the life lessons they’ll need to get through the next 50 or 60 years?
And the kids wander through their own jumble of emotions, which are scribbled across their faces. Are they really grown up enough to challenge the world now? Are they as good as they tell themselves they are in their giddiest moments, or as puny as they dread they might be in their most insecure times?
Memories of graduations past come flooding through now.
One year at Joppatowne High’s graduation, seniors in the school chorus rose to sing “Love In Any Language.” The song was exquisite to hear — and to watch. As they sang the words, they simultaneously held out their hands to speak in sign language.
At Centennial High, I watched a graduate named Dori Spittel slowly hobble her way across the podium on metal crutches. She was born with neuromuscular problems. What took other kids an hour might take her three hours.
But now, she delivered the school’s graduation speech. She made no mention of her troubles. She just stood there for 10 minutes, no notes in front of her, and held everybody spellbound as she talked of the closeness of her schoolmates and her hopes for the future.
Then, there was a night at Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High where a girl named Ronda Alston walked among rows of her seated classmates and sang “Somewhere” from “West Side Story.”
“There’s a time for us/Some day a time for us/Time together with time to spare/Time to learn/Time to care/Some day!”
And a wonderful thing began to happen. A boy reached out to hold Ronda’s hand, and then a girl two seats down did the same. And then, more hands reached out from all the rows of Ronda’s classmates, scores of them extending through the air, reaching for a hand to hold one last time before everyone had to go their separate ways.
But I remember one more moment from that night at Our Lady of Pompei. There were maybe two dozen kids on the stage. And each of them took a rose sitting in a box, and they walked off the stage and out into the audience to search for their parents.
And they gave each of them a rose. Only it wasn’t just a rose they were giving. There were embraces that started out awkwardly but then didn’t stop. And there were muffled sobs, and people hugging in threes and fours, and some dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs.
Never mind all the arguments across the years of adolescence. Never mind all the lectures; never mind all the backtalk. They’d come through the stretch drive in one piece, and now they were saying thank you without having to utter a word.
And then everyone stepped into the future.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).