Graduations

hey Dave,

hey lo bud! You're one heck of a guy. I'm glad that i got to know you. You'll go real far & I'm sure you will. I wish you the best of luck in the future. We've waited and worked for 4 hard years to get this far. We're here. See ya in the future & at our reunion.

"c/o 90" Rules!

Love Ya, Sara H.

Yesterday afternoon we had Josceline over at our house after the Memorial Day presentation by local veterans' groups was, for the first time since I've lived in Minot at least, moved indoors – in this case, to a meeting room in the Grand Hotel on North Broadway. The place was filled, and I was especially impressed that Sarah and Jeffrey rose and placed their hands over their hearts for the Presentation of the Colors and the Pledge of Allegiance without any prompting. (Jeffrey even got an award in his class for memorizing the Pledge this year.)

David,
Good luck at Stetson this fall. With your brains I know you will achieve a lot and go places. It's been a long 13 years but we finally made it! Good luck and see you at our reunion.


Your friend, Jason P.

Perhaps military service among the menfolk in my family will skip a generation – my dad was in World War 2, my grandpa in World War 1, and I tried to enlist in my mid-20s and even had a Navy recruiter come out to my house during high school but I had too many medical issues – but I love a point the main speaker, the Vice Commander on MAFB's 5th Bomb Wing, made. That even if we did not choose to serve in our country's military (and since 1973 you haven't had to, although all males still have to register for Selective Service and potentially be drafted) we as members of our community can still serve by being supportive of our soldiers and sailors.

Sarah, Jeffrey, and Josceline, after Martha and I treated them to lunch at Dairy Queen, were playing and found my senior high school yearbook. Paging through that now-23-year-old tome (which may be the only yearbook EVER colored pink, parts of which I'll excerpt this week between the paragraphs) I'm amazed that I had much the same issues when I graduated high school that many I know do now. Memorial Day Weekend in my area is generally the time for graduation parties and ceremonies, and of the parties we attended four, two here in Minot on Saturday and two in Garrison an hour southwest of us Sunday.


David
Well Dave thanks for helping me in english. I really appreciate it. Good luck at being a teacher. Keep in touch.

Friends Kevin

If I were just writing about Minot, I could have called this blog "The Pastor's Daughter and The Choir Leader's Son", for Krista and Evan who graduated from Minot High School are them, respectively. And we were invited to those parties in the afternoon, one held in our church basement and the other at our local La Quinta Inn. Lunch and dinner were pretty much taken care of, and at church Sunday morning fifteen graduating seniors were recognized, though only eight were at the service proper. And no disrespect meant, unless we've got an immediate family member graduating in Minot – Breanna's next year – getting into the ceremony of about five hundred graduates per year is not our chosen option.

Garrison High School, on the other hand, where 1/11 of the graduating class was related to us (twenty-three grads out of a population of 1470, as opposed to my class' seventy-eight grads out of a Crescent City, Florida population of 1571) by being the grandchildren of Martha's aunt – which makes Kevin and Amy second cousins to Sarah and Jeffrey since K and A are the children of our kids' great-aunts and uncles, or something like that. Interesting story I learned later, though I did not see this myself; of those twenty-three graduates I referred to for Garrison, only twenty-TWO marched for one student got shot and killed in a hunting accident some time before. There was an empty chair on stage for him.


David,
It has been, I must say, an honor to know you. You are a kind and intelligent guy, and I wish you all the luck that life has to offer. I know you may think that people have laughed at you for different things through the years, but they only laugh, because they wish they could be more like you. Good luck!

Love, Kim Vaughn C/O '90

Like most of our newly minted graduates, I still have no idea what I'm going to be when I grow up! I'd like to think that the members of Garrison's class of 1963 who were in attendance Sunday – two of whom are teachers there – have some inkling by now? (Does that mean I'll have some idea by the year 2040?) But I do know what I'm doing right now, just taking a step. This morning I brought Sarah and Jeffrey to Camp Metigoshe Day Camp (think Vacation Bible School) at Bethany after they had their six-month checkups at Dakota Kids' Dentistry, where Jeffrey walked out cavity-free and Sarah had two of her adult molars COME IN with cavities, so she has to get those filled next month.

We got in line for registration this year (both our kids' first year going, as last year when Sarah was eligible for day camp and Jeffrey for preschool we were on our way to visit my mom in Kentucky for the last time on Earth) and Sandi who came behind us with her two kids Carter and Journey who're both Jeffrey's age asked me first how is it that Jeffrey's skin is so tan – what's called around here a "farmer's tan" – and then he and Carter were off in their own world playing noisily "rock paper scissors" and Sandi wondered whether we ought to have them separated at day camp. But they both picked up on that and Jeffrey said in a lower voice that HE would make sure Carter was ok. And gave him a big hug. I am so proud of him, and I so want Sarah and Jeffrey, I pray, to do better than me.

David