The Graduate

Story by Steve A. Maze Photos from the author’s collection

Mywife and I attended our granddaughter’s graduation ceremony on a spring night at Arab High School. Like many people in attendance, I watched with mixed emotions.

My wife and I beamed with pride as our granddaughter, Katelin, and her classmates walked to the fifty yard line of the football field to receive their diplomas. Many of the graduates were not only classmates, but Katelin’s closest friends.

It was hard not to drift back in time to my graduation ceremony 48 years earlier in the new gymnasium a couple of hundred yards away. Yes the “new” gym is now 48-years-old as well.

I recalled the future dreams my classmates and I had that night. No doubt, we would continue to share our dreams together just like we always had. Why would anything change?

Unfortunately, old age and the wear of time have taught me many things over the past half-century ... things I am not so anxious to share with my granddaughter and her friends.

What they do not realize is that their graduation ceremony will probably be the last time they see many of their classmates.

Many will quickly move out of the area for various reasons. Some leave to attend college. Others go to work, but relocate to other cities or states to enhance their careers.

Sadly, two or three of my classmates passed away within a few years of graduating.

Oh, they will still see or hear from those closest to them. They will run into others at various times over the years ... or maybe even work together for a while. But it will never be the same as the days they spent together dreaming away their future in a classroom.

It isn’t those I was closest to that I always think about. I can’t help but wonder what happened to those shy classmates who mostly stayed to themselves. They didn’t participate in the typical immature hi-jinks most teenagers delight in. Never grabbed a pom-pom and led a pep rally ... just sat in the back of the classroom and didn’t say much.

Even though my classmates and I shared many years of our lives with those bashful types, we didn’t really know that much about them ... and know even less now.

One of those graduates was a guy I will refer to as Paul, although that is not his real name. He did not graduate in my class, but three decades earlier.

Paul didn’t really have a chance in life when a doctor spanked him into this world on a frigid winter night.

He was doomed to a life of poverty and hand-me-down living. His dream of a better life wouldn’t come anytime soon. Even his smallest dreams never seemed to come true. He would have to pull himself up by the bootstraps more than once, but that’s hard to do when you have no boots.

Paul’s face was ruggedly homely with a shock of red, wiry hair combed over to one side. He was also tall and raw boned, his body made muscular from swinging a double bit ax and throwing square bales of hay into a barn loft while standing flatfooted on the ground.

Paul got his physical traits from his father - a man whose body and personality were both harder than the bark on a tree. His father was a drunk. Not an alcoholic. He was a drunk. There is a difference.

His dad had a hair-trigger temper, especially when he was drinking. He liked to fight, and would often arrive home with the coppery smell of blood on his shirt. That was the only thing he brought home, however. His paycheck that was supposed to buy groceries, and maybe a few clothes, would always be gone.

Paul’s dad seemed to be in a race with the devil to see who would be the first to cross death’s finish line. The devil let him win. His dad died when Paul was in the sixth grade.

From that point forward it was just Paul and his mother. Of course, it really had always just been them anyway.

Now Paul was the man of the house, and he intended to give his mother the type life she deserved. She would suffer no more beatings from the hands of a drunk, or go hungry so her son could eat.

The local church Paul and his mother attended helped them as much as possible. Religious women with buns of hair stacked high atop their heads like a double-dip ice cream cone brought them blue mason jars full of fresh vegetables from their gardens, hand-stitched quilts and other household items they needed to survive.

But survive is all they did. There were times if it hadn’t been for the milk cow, they both would have probably starved. Others may have been worse off, but they didn’t make it.

Paul’s massive physique allowed him to hire out to neighbors and do labor intensive work, yet he was forced to become a man way too early in life. The gentle giant may have been six feet tall and weighed 185 pounds, but he was only 12 years old.

His mother only requested one thing from her son. She wanted him to be the first person in their family - on either side - to finish high school.

Paul wanted to please his mother, so he attended school while doing chores for the neighbors in the evenings and on Saturdays.

School work wasn’t easy for Paul, but a persistent mother and a dedicated teacher enabled him to barely scrape by on his grades. It wasn’t that Paul was lazy or dumb - he was simply in an almost impossible situation for someone who had yet to reach their teens.

Still, he never complained ... just sat stone-faced in his desk on the back row of a classroom.

Another thing his classmates did not know was what Paul did before he made it to school each morning. He milked the cow, fed the chickens, gathered eggs and chopped wood so his mother could cook and stay warm during the long days of the bitter cold Alabama winter.

Paul may have had his father’s physique, but he inherited his mother’s mild demeanor, even though some said her demeanor was more submissive than mild.

That turned out to be a good thing for some of the boys in his class since a few of them would often pick on the quiet and timid Paul. The fact that the overgrown boy didn’t fight back made him an easy target.

His classmates made fun of his shyness. They made fun of his clothes. The elbows of every shirt and the knees in every pair of overalls had patches on them.

They were given to him by others, mostly men in his community who had outgrown them. There were only two sizes in Paul’s wardrobe - too large and too small.

Not that any of the boys in his class necessarily dressed any better than Paul, but a few delighted in the fact that someone was actually worse off than themselves. Paul had long ago grown accustomed to the torment those three or four righteous-thinking classmates bestowed on him.

Other classmates would have delighted in seeing the Paul Bunyan look-alike pick his tormentors up in his massive paws and throw them across the room like a bale of hay. And he could have, but he didn’t.

As always, Paul sat quietly as the high school principal called each graduates name in the auditorium that beautiful spring night. The students walked to the front of the stage and received their diploma as proud parents and grandparents stood and eagerly clapped their hands red in delight.

The audience grew quiet, however, when Paul’s name was called. It seemed as if no one had come to see him on this night that was to have been so special.

That was okay with Paul. He never expected to be bathed in a spotlight like movie stars.

Paul just wanted to get his diploma and go back to the hard scrabble farm on which he lived.

Then a frail, hollow-eyed woman slowly stood near the back of the auditorium and began slapping two limp hands together, her long bony fingers worn thin from sewing up holes in her son’s shirts and scrubbing the dirt and sweat out of his frayed overalls in a black wash pot.

Paul’s classmates may not have known much about him, but many audience members seemed to be familiar with Paul and his mother.

Groups of people suddenly began to stand in a wave-like fashion to applaud as the overgrown young man shook hands with the principal and moved the tassel on his cap from the right side to the left.

Paul had a smile on his face the night he received his diploma. It was the first time anyone had ever seen him smile. And he had a right to smile.

It was the first time something had been given to him that wasn’t secondhand. It hadn’t belonged to someone else before being discarded to him. He had earned it himself.

Shortly after, the audience watched as his mother walked toward her son wearing a feed sack dress and the perpetual stoop in her back from hoeing too many years in a dusty field.

A twinkle could be seen coming from her dead eyes as she rubbed Paul’s diploma with her fingers like it was a bejeweled watch.

As is often the case, Paul’s classmates lost track of him shortly after graduation.

Paul moved away a couple of years later when his mother died. Some heard he joined the U.S. Army, but no one knew for sure.

I hope all of this year’s graduates are able to stay in touch with their classmates in the coming years. Believe it or not, you will appreciate your relationship more in the future than you do today.

But most of all ... don’t lose track of the Paul’s in your class.