A baccalaureate service in Kentucky a week after the Kentucky Derby naturally featured horse-racing allusions. At commencement, said the speaker, the trumpet sounds and the gates open and the graduates burst out of the gates into the race...and at that point, there's no getting them back in the barn.
My daughter was out of the barn last night at baccalaureate singing her heart out and then directing the entire crowd in singing "How Great Thou Art." She had tremendous presence on the stage, keeping the crowd moving vigorously through the verses by the sheer force of her voice and arms and personality. Today she'll walk across the stage and pick up the diploma for which she's worked so hard and then we'll have a mad dash of packing up and moving on out to the next turn in the horserace.
I have no clear memory of my own college baccalaureate service in that same auditorium 25 years ago, perhaps because more recent turns in the horserace are dominating my mind, but I do recall that sense of possibility that I see displayed so prominently in the faces of my daughter and her classmates. From this point on, anything can happen--and there's no getting them back into the barn.
Which is fine, because who wants to live in a barn?
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