📋 Don't You Worry, I Said Hey, Baby, I Got Your Money 💵
It's a graduation year. The weather didn't get the memo. Neither did my feet.
There's a rhythm to adult social life that anybody who lived through the AM radio era understands instinctively. You have your wedding years and your graduation years, and they alternate with the kind of cruel predictability that used to get worked into the bridge of a Dionne Warwick song. This is a graduation year. Which means outdoor events, potluck tables under a canopy that is slightly too small, and a sky that has been threatening since Thursday.
You know how it goes. You stand in the closet for twelve minutes trying to thread the needle between festive and waterproof. You land, as you always do, on the shoes that look sensible. Not glamorous — you abandoned that when you saw the forecast — but at least not embarrassing. Except they are embarrassing, because the ones you own that look comfortable are not. The ones that actually are comfortable look like you drove to the party directly from a podiatry appointment. So you choose the liars. The shoes that dare to look like a reasonable decision right up until the moment you're standing on someone's back deck for forty-five minutes making conversation about the graduate's plans.
The shoes that dare to look like a reasonable decision right up until minute forty-five.
Meanwhile, the weather is doing its thing. Not raining — never actually raining, because then it would be a whole different story and you could go home — but threatening. Gray. That specific May gray that feels personally hostile. The kind of gray that makes the graduation balloon arch look a little funereal. Everyone is pretending they don't feel it. The graduate's grandmother has produced a cardigan from somewhere. Smart woman.
Here is what nobody ever says out loud: graduation parties are an act of love performed under protest. You're there because you mean it, and you're miserable because meaning it doesn't waterproof anything. The party mix is doing the job — there's always someone's aunt who queued up Celebration and a decent contingent of people who actually know all the words — and the graduate is radiant in the way twenty-two-year-olds are radiant, which is effortlessly, which is maddening. Your feet hurt. The punch is too sweet. A cold front is moving in from the northwest. But who's counting?
And you wouldn't have missed it for anything. That's the part that doesn't fit neatly into a verse-chorus-bridge structure. The shoes were a mistake. The weather was uncooperative. The punch was a choice someone made. And still — standing on that deck in your lying, ugly shoes, under that peculiar shade of May gray — you were exactly where you were supposed to be. Somebody graduated. Somebody made it through. That's worth a little suffering. Just maybe not in these shoes next time.
