12.17.2006

The game (of life)

... I just finished watching yesterday's national championship game ...

What can I say?

...Northwest lost the game on their own missed opportunities and mistakes, and Grand Valley State capitalized on them ...

That and Cullen Finnerty could not be stopped ...

* * *

... Kates and I joined her family yesterday for her brother Orrin's college graduation ...


... The four of us and the family dog loaded up the family van and made the three-hour trek to the campus, meeting Orrin and his girlfriend at his apartment ... ah, the rat traps that are campus housing ...

... As if we weren't already dreading having to sit through a drawn-out roll call of names, the ceremony got off to an interesting start when the university chancellor stepped t o the podium to welcome the audience and the microphone was dead ... We waited for another 15 minutes as the tech-heads replaced the microphone and then replaced it again, and pride-filled parents spilled from their seats onto the gymnasium floor to get close-ups of their graduates ...

... Once the ceremony started, it moved swiftly. The chancellor addressed the crowd, and an alum who's now a radio show host/comedian gave the commencement address, encouraging the graduates to "save the world" with observations of his own life and times at the college ...

... Then the roll call. Orrin was in the last row of graduates, and that gave us plenty of time to decide what we would yell when his name was finally called and he crossed the stage. The options included: "You're kidding," "Save the world" and "Save a tree." He graduated with a degree in natural resources ... But when Orrin's name was called, we pretty much just said whatever came to our minds ...

From the campus, the graduation party moved to Bernard's, an up-scale German restuarant, where we feasted on duck and salmon ...

But before the food came the champagne. Each of us offered a toast to Orrin, congratulating him and passing on whatever words of widsom we had ...

When it came to my turn, I told Orrin to rememeber one thing: Plastics.

* * *
For the drive to and from the graduation, I was honored to be in the front seat of the van, iPod in hand and plugged in, providing the official soundtrack for the road trip ...

... On the way up we mostly played music heard on Grey's Anatomy before straying into some top 40. Then on the way back, I started with some mellow stuff from Norah Jones, Dido and other favorite female artists to lighten the mood a little bit, and then got into the good stuff with some truly classic rock: selections from The Beatles, Beach Boys, The Turtles, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Joe Cocker, and on and on ...

But that's not the reason I'm telling this story ...

As we sat in Orrin's apartment wasting time before our dinner reservation, Kates' dad started to mention to the group that I brought my "strawberry" and was playing music during the drive ...

Clearly, he was referring to my iPod and confused it with the popular Blackberry. But he called it a strawberry.

I burst into loud laughter, and then explained to his bemusement what he had just done.

Good times.

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