It’s June. The frogs are so boisterous I jam my ear against a pillow and lay another one over my head at night. I’ve got to sleep. This school year may be hurtling, but it isn’t over.

June is graduation season–in some ways, the whole point of all this teaching.

Of course, real education is not about reaching an end point. It’s about process and experience and relationships and continual growth, I know. And this whole credentialing business is probably rotten, historically, intrinsically. But rites of passage only come around so often, and I love them.

I was reading to my younger child at bedtime just now, a sweet and strange chapter book called The Lost Library by Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass. I read right by this line about a fifth grade graduation,

“Another graduation day. The poems were especially good this time. (I listen every year, from the corner of our porch.) And the sight of the children running like wolves to the dessert table is always cheering.”

I had to stop reading and put the book on my chest.

“Can I tell you the story of my fifth grade graduation?”

“Yes”

I fell into it. It’s one of my happiest memories from childhood. I thought about why.

It’s cause I felt free.

And also connected, in that freedom, at twilight in June at the end of a school year.

I remember I had lost my voice, and all three fifth grade classes would be singing ‘Lean on Me’ from the library stage. The song comes into my mind frequently, even now, because we had to learn it by heart, and feel it, and I did. “You just call on me, brother, when you need a hand/ We all need somebody to lean on…” (Thanks, real brother, for answering the phone tonight, for telling the stories of all those songs…) I felt so cool singing those lines and I was sad I’d lost my voice and couldn’t belt it out with the rest of them. I remember my grey-blue dress with white flecks on it and a little belt, and I remember that we were swaying, and I remember trying hard to sing that song.

Those kids, my fifth grade friends, are still and forever my best friends. Not that middle and high school weren’t tough, not that we also didn’t fall out for years at a time, too.

After the ceremony, we rushed our parents–”Can we have a sleepover? Please? Please?” I remember being floored when mine said yes. And then it was twilight, and it was just us, a small pile of ex-fifth graders alone on the Ithaca Commons. In my memory I was barefoot on the pavement, but that’s hard to believe now. We had money for ice cream, and we were walking somewhere to spend it. Did they sell ice cream at the Commons Market? It doesn’t matter. We ended up at The Commons Market, so quaint and seedy, and there it was: a crate of peaches on the floor. With a little euphoria we shocked ourselves silly and bought peaches instead of ice cream and ate them, juice dripping all over us, twilight turning dark, free will and new edges.

Graduations might, if marked, summon those deep and sticky imprints that might touch what it is to feel free.

In the chapter book we were just reading, the teacher read the famous Mary Oliver poem at the ceremony, the one people misread for the purpose of tormenting graduates by adding more pressure to the day. You know it, the poem that ends: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” It’s a perfect carpe diem moralizing bludgeon, if you’re not really reading the poem or paying attention, generally.

But be warned: if you are someone who wants to send this incandescent poem to a recent graduate, that newly credentialed, literate soul might take inspiration, drop out of grad school and reject their tidy new job offer, go west, etc. because it’s more transgressive than people who put the last lines on a mug would have us think.

Here is Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” in full:

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean–

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of

up and down–

who is gazing around with her enormous and

complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly

washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through

the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

No other graduation night in my life has ever rivaled that one from fifth grade, when we left Central School together, we wolves, those unexpected peaches, that darkening twilight freedom, eye level to the grasses, that idle lean & sway.