Bleary-eyed and exhausted after senior prank night, my exchange daughter still is giddy with excitement as she dons cap and gown for the traditional Senior Walk through her school's halls.
As "Pomp and Circumstance" plays over the speakers, I recall my own high school graduation nearly 35 years earlier with mixed feelings. On one hand, the future with all its glorious possibilities stretched out before me. On the other, comparisons to higher-achieving classmates left me with feelings of insecurity that have never entirely been erased.
Though it started out with a bang, my school career began to fizzle somewhere around the ninth grade. Accustomed to sitting first or second chair in the band, I was demoted to third. Instead of playing the lead parts in school plays, I was cast in the chorus.
By high school it was clear that I was different from my older sisters. They were in the marching band, an elite group that played every year in the Hudson Thanksgiving Day Parade and during halftime at Detroit Lions games. I sang in the lower-profile chorus. While they contemplated health careers, I chose journalism.
And when we were graduated -- not in a familiar school gym decorated with lilacs but at an anonymous auditorium in Detroit -- they wore satin stoles marking them as summa and magna cum laude scholars, while I wore only cum laude honors.
It all comes flooding back at a high school awards ceremony where my exchange daughter is being recognized. I watch as the same top 10 students are called to the podium over and over again to receive scholarships and accolades. They're the ones everyone knows will succeed, the ones destined for Ivy League or Big Ten colleges and six-figure salaries.
But what of the others, I wonder, the ones just under the radar, the simply average, the underachievers?
I'm still pondering that question a few days later as I pick up my exchange daughter after work. A budding scientist, she'd passed the time waiting for me at a local bookstore, where she'd found a biography about Albert Einstein.
It seems that the genius was a late bloomer whose mother was disturbed by how long it took him to learn how to talk. In elementary school, his teachers regarded him as a foolish dreamer. Although he loved academics, young Einstein hated sports and school and eventually dropped out. Without a diploma, he had to take special exams to get into college and failed the first set.
I consider my own classmates and find several parallels among them. One, an undersized boy often picked on by bigger bullies, now is a computer guru for an important downstate company. Another -- the quiet one nobody noticed -- now is a doctor here in Traverse City.
So this year, as seniors everywhere march down the aisle to the beginning of the rest of their lives, I'll be cheering for the Albert Einsteins among them: those late bloomers whose genius has yet to take root and blossom.
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