Yesterday I went up to the high school to watch a friend's child graduate. Seventeen years ago, her mother and I were pregnant at the same time, so we had our baby showers together. But Sue's daughter was born before the kindergarten-entrance cutoff date and my son was born after it. So he is home for another year, even though the two are nearly the same age.

I watched the second and third basemen on Paul's championship second-grade Farm League team graduate. I watched a friend's child give the valedictory speech--a child I have known since toddlerhood, when she ran around with my little boys among the calves and kittens on her family's dairy farm while Tom built her father a new cow barn.

All these little children who aren't little children any more! How easy it is to wax sentimental over the passage of time, yet in truth I spent much of their little-childhood wishing they would stop crying or falling into the mud or demanding food or breaking stuff or having nosebleeds all over my couch.

For his part, my son said his primary feelings during the ceremony were loneliness at parting with lifelong friends who had always been just a little older, just a little more capable and pulled together, and an anxious sensation of not being ready to follow in their trail.

Ah, well. Even though graduations are always excruciatingly dull affairs, they also mark a formal border: a relationship that seemed eternal is over. The child will never again live at home in the same way. The schoolmates will never again climb the same ladder in the same order. There's nothing new or unexpected in this shift, but it's a shock nonetheless.

Today Paul donned a revolting pair of pink slacks, willed to him by a graduate, and went back to high school, where he'll twiddle his thumbs for the last few lame-duck days of the school year. He prides himself on being a sharp dresser and under normal circumstances would never be caught dead in baggy, ill-fitting, Pepto-Bismol-colored pants. Today, apparently, nostalgiac silliness is more important than style. I hope he and the other lonely juniors have a happy day giggling about how dumb he looks.