Gifts for Graduation

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

$20.13

May and June remain The Graduation Season featuring noisy assemblies in gymnasia or football fields wherein recordings of Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory,” which is about the British Empire, are miscued on electric gadgets made in China. In the meantime, the solemnity of graduation is marked with the sacred cowbell, the holy air horn, and the blessed vuvuzela.  This rite of passage, which, objectively, is not a rite at all, requires a gift.

Selecting a gift for the graduation speaker is easy – a one-minute egg-timer. 

Selecting a gift for the graduate is increasingly difficult. 

Once upon a time (when we were all poor but didn’t know it), a pen was an excellent choice as a gift for a graduate.  Pens were elegantly made and meant to last, and like a suit and a watch suggested that the bearer was going to escape following the plow or the cross-cut saw.

In East Texas there is no audible difference between “pen” and “pin,” and someone in need of a pen asks “Have you got an ink-pen?” and pronounces it “Have you got uh ink-pen?” 

Young people (and it’s their fault, right?) don’t know that some pens are aesthetically pleasing works of art and can be refilled; under-forties are familiar only with disposable, made-in-Indonesia ink-sticks which don’t work well or last long, on those rare occasions when the writer is not tippy-tapping on toxic plastic keys made in China.

Once upon a time (when we were all poor but we had love), a father took his graduating son to Mixson Brothers and bought him his first grown-up suit for graduation itself, and for job interviews, parties, weddings, baptisms, and funerals.  The play-clothes of boyhood were put aside; the young man began to dress as a young man.

But now that the Medicare generation creakily disport themselves in knee-pants, flip-flops, Grateful Dead tees, and Toronto Blue Jays ball caps, no thoughtful parent would ask young men and young women to dress as godawfully tacky as their grandparents.

Once upon a time (when a dollar was worth a dollar), a watch was a very useful graduation gift, because the man who needed a watch wasn’t following the position of the sun or the mill whistle as a schedule; he was doing better.  Watches now are historical artifacts like mill whistles, for the modern young man of affairs refers to his MePad for the time.

A Bible?  Well, which one?  Should the Old Testament follow the Alexandrian canon or the Palestinian canon?  Old King James?  Middle-aged King James?  New King James?  And who says?  Given the number of specialty renderings (there is even a C. S. Lewis Bible, in a translation that long post-dates his death), should the words of Glenn Beck and President Obama be printed in red?

Perhaps the safest graduation gift is a nice little check for $20.13.  The graduate can apply it to the purchase of his own pen, suit, watch, Bible, or life, and he will be very grateful to you.

I know the political script requires that I write “they,” but one graduate cannot be “they,” and “he” in context is gender-neutral, as it always has been.  Young people can be a bit rebellious, and you and I can hope and pray that they will always rebel at least a little against their political masters who try to bully them into following the Orwellian Newspeak illogic, both in syntax and in ideology, that one is many and many are one.

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