The 2006-07 academic year at Eastern Mennonite University is almost history. To this observer, each seems to go by faster than the previous one.
Sunday, the 89th annual commencement at EMU, will be my 36th to cover in my role as public information officer. I’ve heard many speeches and watched hundreds of students walk the gangplank, receive their sheepskins and exit the platform as full-fledged alumni, with all the rights, honors, duties and fund-appeals ascribed thereunto.
It strikes me up side the head that it will be 40 years since my own graduation from this noble institution. To paraphrase recording artist Bob Seger, "Forty years, where’d they go? Forty years, I don’t know . . ."
In my cobwebbed cranium I still visualize sitting at a desk in a poorly-lit classroom on second floor of the old administration building (which burned down in January, 1984 while being renovated) on a warm May afternoon, taking my last exam, an English literature final for the late J. Herbert Martin.
I gazed out the open window many times while sweating over the test, a series of subjective questions, as the realization sunk in that "this is it." Unless my grade point average states otherwise, I’ll graduate in several days, my checkered college career is over, my first "real" job