Moving On: Graduation

May 13, 2009 and we’re sitting in the new Yankee Stadium on a beautiful Wednesday morning.  The field is transformed with staging, railing and flowers.  I can’t believe I am attending my daughter’s college graduation, as I am sure I just attended my own very recently.  Well it was 27 years ago it just seems recent.  At least it was just last week that I helped Jessie move into U-Hall for her freshman year and just a couple of days ago we visited her in Italy for that second semester of her sophomore year.  Yesterday Kevin and I were painting her room pink.  Man it was hot. 

 

Back to reality.  Back to today.  Sitting in the airport to return our Midwestern home I am reflecting on the last three days that were an exhilarating whirlwind of running and doing, packing and eating, walking and cabs, grad events and chilling.    Jessie is just beautiful and I swell with pride every time I think about her, see her or talk (brag) about her to my friends and colleagues.  She is sweet and smart and has completed a challenging educational experience in the most urban of settings in the world.  New York University is full of itself and for good reason.  I really don’t want to go into it as every speaker, at this well-established and self-proclaimed largest private university in the country, at her school’s ceremony and at the all inclusive ceremony today stated it over and over.  The list of Alumni and the city itself earned that right.  It doesn’t mean that we Big Ten grads need to hear it over and over as if we had an accident on the carpet and they are rubbing our noses in it.

 

May 29, 2009:  Whatever the experience Jessie is back in Chicago now and planning on going back to school to achieve a new goal.  I am glad she is doing it in Chicago.  NYU is a super school and so is Northwestern University where she plans to take some science courses she needs for her current avocation.  I’m sure 4 years from now when Kevin graduates University of Iowa and Jessie finishes grad school I will be thinking….it was just last week that I sat in Yankee Stadium, listening to Senator Clinton speak as my daughter graduated.  And the week before that I was sitting in Assembly Hall in Champaign, Illinois wearing a cap an gown.