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| Proud Parents University of Virginia |
is the perfect sketching opportunity. A few weekends ago, our son received his masters degree in exercise physiology from the University of Virginia, founded in 1819 by President Thomas Jefferson. The graduation was held on the lawn behind The Rotunda, the original college, teeming with graduates, balloons, expectancy and balloons. As luck would have it, we ended up on the lawn quite a distance from where the graduate students entered, (ah, that dreaded bread and butter theory) so seeing our graduate enter was out of the question. We just plopped down to watch the thousands of undergraduates file into the seating area. Filed and filed and filed. Thousands of graduates. Over one hour of pomp. Lucky for me......my sketch book was in my bag so I was able to entertain myself during the three-hour graduation ceremony and speech given by Katie Couric. We were so proud.
Detail noted during the event: the graduates in all of the almost all of disciplines filed in organized lines with a noted degree of maturity and sophistication.....until the end. Those graduates in liberal arts seemed to immediately break line and move forward with no sense of order whatsoever.....some wearing shorts and sandals, graduation gowns not fastened, with no sense of seriousness at all. It was at that very moment that I was most proud to hold a B.A degree!
