Cap and Gowns For All

The first hint of the formality of Alex’s graduation from fifth grade to came in the cab on the ride to his school, when Jill’s cell phone rang. I heard Jill say the name of Alex’s teacher. “He’s sick?” I thought. “This morning of all mornings?”

No. Instead the teacher wanted to know if we’d gotten the message about dressing all the graduating kids in black and white for the ceremony? I had some memory of that but not a strong one — at this point in my parenthood only a drop of guilt can turn into a real past event in my head. Alex went to school in khakis and a T, and good luck getting him to wear anything else these days.

Teacher got him into a white baseball T. Alex was one of two kids in his special-needs class graduating, the rest of the graduates made up of kids from the typical school Alex’s classroom sits in. The kids were in summer dresses, little suits, some ties, all of their shoulders draped in the school’s purple grad banner. Most of the parents were dressed to match, minus the banners, of course. I showed up in cargo shorts and a short-sleeve button-down shirt and Chuck Taylors. Why hadn’t I foreseen this moment? For a moment I told myself that being the parent of a kid like Alex should give me a built-in excuse, but that sounded feeble the instant I said it to myself.

I hadn’t, and the moment soon took me in the throat. There were all the kids and all the awards, all the balloons and all the digitial camera phones and all the applause – no great amount of the latter but certainly no small amount of it, either, for Alex and his autistic classmate, even as Alex kept escaping on stage to see what was behind the drawn curtain. In his white baseball T and khakis. Once he got a laugh. Halfway through the ceremony, I saw he’d shed his banner. He won an award for reading, along with four typically-developing students.

About that same time, it hit me that this was it. Jill has already talked about the kindness of this place, a kindness I confess I’ve taken for granted for six years. It hit me that maybe this was the end of this kind of kindness, for a little while, and I just didn’t know it yet.

Leaving too was the assistant principal, off to assume the big chair at a special-needs school in Queens. She was a unit teacher when we met her a few years ago, rising soon to assistant principal, and this fall, when Alex gets off the bus in a strange place and it hits him that “school” now means something dramatically different, she will be far away. I’ll miss her and miss them all in the way I didn’t realize until this ceremony, when it feels like I graduated in a way, too.

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President Obama announces new initiatives to help Americans with disabilities.