Hollis Brookline seniors celebrate new heights

“What the (expletive) is happening?” That’s about the extent of what was going through my mind as, like little windup dolls, the entirety of my class at Hollis Brookline High School marched down an aisle of trampled grass and through a sea of shining camera lenses. It was yet another lengthy graduation practice; it had to be. Only, we were outside, I was sweating beneath a cheap, nonbreathing polyester robe and the band’s rendition of “Pomp and Circumstance” was, strangely, lacking an under-the-breath chorus of “My reindeer flies siiiideways. Yours flies upside dooown!” No, I decided, this was indeed the real thing. We were finally graduating – commencing, as the etymologically ironic term goes. We were moving on to bigger and better things, to places where the Internet is uncensored and students are trusted with nondisposable eating utensils. I won’t say “real life”; we are, the vast majority of us, delaying that inevitability with college. Seated – finally – in blue plastic folding chairs with the rest of the graduating class on June 16, I found myself deeply appreciative of the lack of sugarcoating most of the commencement speeches provided. The truism goes that people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.