We swore last week would be the final graduation story, but permit us one last one, for old-time’s sake.

On Thursday last week, Junior got duded up in his cap and gown and tassel and strangle of cords denoting his participation in various clubs and then joined in the three-and-a-half hour slow-motion endurance race that is Little Rock Central High School’s graduation festivities at Verizon Arena.

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From way up in the stands, proud Ma and Pa and a passel of our relatives watched until we saw Junior file in, then tracked him with our eyes to his seat, noting where he was so we could find him later in the sea of black robes. Four speeches, some kind words by the superintendent and then began the calling of the names, proceeding at last to Junior’s section, then Junior’s row, then Junior himself, striding across the stage with such nervous energy that it looked like he dang near took the hand off Principal Nancy Rousseau when it came time for the grip-n-grin for the photographer. As promised last week, Proud Papa was unable to keep himself together, though we contained it to a trickle of tears instead of the full blown, “where’s my blankie?” episode we’d feared.

Junior made his way back to his seat, and as the roll call continued, Junior’s mother noticed he was leaning forward, speaking animatedly to the people in the next row up. In the stands, we watched as he took the black-and-gold tassel from his mortarboard and handed it forward to a person in the row in front of him.

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The bottom of the list was finally reached, and the crowd was released into a muggy May night, the far horizon crawling with storms beating with lightning. The Observer hurried around to the street-level tunnel on the south side of Verizon, where the newly graduated would be released into an unprepared world. After a while, we saw Junior and rushed up to him, still in his gown and tie, looking so smart and handsome with his leatherette diploma folder under his arm. After plentiful huzzahs, back-slapping and cheek-kisses that he wiped away embarrassed the same way he did when he was 4 years old, we finally got around to the question that had been with us half the night: What did he do with the tassel from his mortarboard? He’d given it away, the graduate explained, to a friend a row up who realized he’d lost his somewhere between the stage and his seat. Why, The Observer asked, had Junior done a damn fool thing like that, given that it was definitely something we would have liked to squirrel away in the hope chest?

“He said his parents would kill him for losing his tassel before they could take pictures with him, so I gave him mine,” Junior explained. Then he added darkly: “He’s Indian, dad. Indian parents don’t screw around.”

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While we admit we lack a frame of reference for whether that’s true, Junior knows a heck of a lot more young folks of all sorts than we do, so we’re going to go with: probably true. Whatever the case, we were proud of him, yet again, for thinking of another instead of himself. He’s just not about the material things. Whether that means we’ve done him right or laid the foundations for his future life on the streets of this wholly materialistic nation, we don’t know.

At that point, we realized we still hadn’t seen his sheepskin, so there on the sidewalk under the streetlights, with the happy graduates and families streaming past and lightning haunting the horizon, we readied our camera, told him to open up his folder and let us see that diploma.

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“I didn’t get one,” Junior said woefully. “I lost a book, so they gave me a bill.” He flipped open his folder and there, on very nice paper in a very nice font, was Junior’s full, legal name, along with: “Self Reliance and Other Essays: $10.”

He held it up, and as best his Old Man could through gales of laughter, we held the camera steady and pushed the button, freezing that moment, Junior’s bemused face and his final tab for as long as pixels can float in the pixelated ether. As we told him that night: We swear before all that is holy we’re going to get his last bill professionally framed and matted for the wall of the Observatory, because it kind of says it all about what raising him has been like, and because we guarantee seeing it will never fail to give Junior’s Old Man a smile. Always full of surprises, that one.

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