“Through the ages, rites of passage have helped humankind to understand our place in the universe and make peace with it. Rituals and symbols ease life transitions, explain love, and celebrate love's glories. They invest the events of life with substance and mark milestones by which we define ourselves, our communities, and realities. They help us see things as they are; they teach us to see things differently.” -- Beth Witrogen McLeod, "Caregiving: The Spiritual Journey of Love, Loss and Renewal," John Wiley and Sons, 1999
Forty-nine years ago I ignored my high school advisor’s advice – she tried to make it a mandate – about skipping my high school graduation. “It’s a rite of passage,” Margaret Vanderford told me but I replied I was not interested and was leaving early.
I came across Beth Witrogen McLeod’s words a few years back in compiling Randomary, my daybook of book excerpts (page 186.) One beauty of Randomary, which I have somewhat incessantly drawn from here on Burn the Ax Handle, is its delayed effect:
I would choose a passage in 2010 because it sounded interesting or filled a need, and then find deeper meaning years later. This continues to be the case.
I definitely see the wisdom in it: rituals to help see things “as they are”. Having just gone through a bookend-rite of passage – my retirement party – I have a greater understanding of this. The party, in McMinnville on May 4 and hosted by my wife, Lorre, and son, Delaney, was a hugely gratifying event. I am grateful to all who attended and those who spoke and said such nice things about me. All I can say is that for the past 44 years I Got By With A Lotta Help From My Friends.
With this time-borne appreciation for rites of passage, it is thus tempting to find fault with skipping high school graduation in 1976, though am glad I did what I did.
My South Albany High School graduation would have been on my birthday, June 5. Instead, I was in North Carolina by then – the reason for my insouciance was a job in that southern state and an adventure I knew I had to grasp. For what would become a transforming experience, on May 28 or so I boarded a Greyhound in Albany, Ore., and headed to Blue Ridge Assembly YMCA conference center, by way of family in Chicago.
(I would visit Blue Ridge again in 2016, retracing my steps by taking the bus from Oregon to Chicago, and then on to North Carolina, and back. My hosts were Hayward and Nancy Hargrove, who I met in 1977 at Linfield College, when Hayward was dean of students. In one of those true small world twists, some 20 years later after a couple of other academic and pastoral stops, he became chaplain at Blue Ridge, and later retired nearby. So a friend I knew from one context would later have the same context that I had a year before we met. That convolution is how I have come to express the coincidence.)
In 1976 I was planning to return by bus, via Chicago and some Cubs games with cousins, but one night in late August I got a frantic phone call from my Mom informing me she received word that, by Sept. 1, I had to be at school: I was enrolled at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Ore., in the journalism program, classes due to start well into September but the advisor insisted I be there earlier for the annual program orientation.
This was the start of my collegiate journalism training and thus the preamble to what I planned as a career, so it was critical I be there. I know I resisted or resented this at the outset, but here was a rite of passage waiting for me, and I knew it.
Birthdays being a kind of rite of passage, I do love to celebrate them even at age 67 (next month) and while I arrived in North Carolina among strangers on or about that date, all of us young staffers (mostly college students about my age) must have felt something like that. So, Blue Ridge had a wonderful way of celebrating everyone’s birthday for the year, in weekly parties; June came the sixth week I was there, and I shared the spotlight with three other people.
My birthday has always coincided, I am proud to say (as if I had anything to do with it) with the Allied D-Day invasion. Friends were there a year ago on June 6 and I recommended they visit Pegasus Bridge in Benouville, Normandy, which was just down the road from the restaurant where I had the honor of working in the fall of 1980. I learned that towns throughout Normandy have streets or squares named “Le 6 Juin”.
I have sometimes forged my own rites of passage: friends owned Le Manoir d’Hastings and I finagled a job there that fall, ostensibly to stay five or six months and work for room and board and improve my French. The room and certainly the board were wonderful, though not my French and the experiment was cut short after two months, my hosts cordially arranging my flight home. (Somehow I have not a single photo of myself from that fall in Benouville, nor the summer of 1980 spent as in intern at The Nation magazine in New York City.)
But I got to see Paris and I got to see Pegasus Bridge.
It was captured by Allied troops who had actually parachuted into France on le 5 Juin. D-Day’s proximity to my birthday has always held an odd fascination for me, especially when I learned about Pegasus Bridge and what led up to its capture.
Those soldiers, and everyone involved in the Normandy invasion. Now, there was a rite of passage. — N.R.
Congrats on your retirement. Yes, another (I find it hugely satisfying) rite of passage. Wishing you all the best in your new chapter.