Pomp and Circumstance

Alex brought home the T shirt the other day, the shirt that his school issues every June. He goes to a special-needs fifth grade — “will have gone to a special-needs fifth grade” by a week from now — that sits in a school of typically developing kids.  All the graduates get their names on the back of the T shirt. Two of the names from Alex’s class this June, and one of the names is his.

Image: msg.mercyhurst.edu

I don’t know how to feel about these graduations, which this year even came with a school photo of him in a cap and gown. Nothing amiss with that, of course, except that the background of the photo was shelves and shelves of what appear to be law texts. By sixth grade, I’m afraid we have to admit the truth about law texts in Alex’s future.

This will be Alex’s fourth in his 11 years, and I believe if he were typically developing and not autistic he’d probably have gone through just as many. But for him and his classmates, they feel to me anyway a little too much like play, the backgrounds more like cartoons and the cap and gown more like a costume than it does for others. I do feel, on the other hand, that he’s truly graduating into a new breed of schooling next year, when he enters middle school.

On a morning this week — “9 a.m. sharp; this ticket admits two to the ceremony” – Alex will appear small and far away from my seat in the audience. He’ll be holding someone’s hand on his way down the aisle. He probably won’t march in time like the other students — the song always struck me as a bit of dirge, anyway — and he’ll probably be looking around more than the others. I hope he sits through this ceremony. The ones for preschool he wanted little to do with. He kept bolting to us in the audience, then at last ran outside to play. I hope he sits this time. It’ll feel more like progress.