Proud Aunt Alert

This picture, taken at Easter, shows Bias For Action in the background, and his oldest son on the left posing with our oldest daughter on the right - the First Borns from each family, you might say. The oldest son graduated from Mesquite High School last night, and The Mister and I joined about 5,000 other folks at Wells Fargo Arena on ASU's campus for the event.

I was going to make some snarky comment about how that is more people than that arena usually sees except when the U of A comes to town to play basketball, but since my youngest will soon be a Sun Devil, I guess I'll pass on that.

The Mister just had a birthday, and I'll have one yet this year, so I'm going to allow myself one "back in my day..." comment. It seems like, back in my day, graduations were more of a solemn event, and the audience behaved with the appropriate solemnity and respect for the occasion. Last night's audience wasn't as respectful as I would have wished. I'm not talking about the beach balls; when a graduating class is over 700, that seems like a natural consequence. I'm not talking about the parents and friends cheering and tooting their air horns when their graduate is announced. Again, because of the size of the class, that is the only way to differentiate and honor the individual kid. I'm talking about the audience yelling things and disrupting various parts of the program, like the music portions or the principal's remarks; and the audience participating in the behavior of throwing beach balls down to the students on the floor, and then of flying paper airplanes over the crowd after the beach balls had run out. The audience did redeem itself somewhat by cheering loudly for the special needs kids receiving their diplomas at the end.

I suppose my feelings were heightened somewhat because of the person I'd come to honor in graduating; my nephew is one of the most polite, respectful guys you'll ever meet. He's affectionate to his sisters, sweet to young children, gifted athletically, musically, AND academically, a hard worker, and a generally upbeat guy. He will be heading to his momma's home state in the fall where he will attend Texas A&M. I have no doubt of his success, and I expect to see him doing pushups after touchdowns on televised football games with the rest of the Corps.

Gig 'em, Aggies!