High School Graduation of 2000
We all prepared in an outside room, then marched in. Needless to say we were all so nervous I think only half went exactly as planned. Timing wasn't perfect (oh well). We marched down the isle, and each of us grabbed a candle from one of the junior girls. Following that missionary Mr. Lane prayed. I signed my song, "Surely the Presence of the Lord is in this Place" as Rae sang, and we got applauded. My friend Wallie gave his valedictorian speech (over half of which his teacher and mom wrote *smile*). The two parts I remember best is "how will we ever forget the time we went to the zoo, and Julia got attacked by a crazy goat...or the time we planned on going to the softball game, but decided to stop and play bumper cars instead (car crash happened on way there)."Then we gave out roses.
I had twelve. Gave one to Miss Cornell (school sign teacher), one to Mrs. Cooper (my pastor/principal's wife), one to Miss Collett (lady at my church that tries to prepare me for signing songs there), one to Mrs. Doverspike (a sign student of mine last fall), my three junior female friends Sarah (my co-worship team leader), Kellie (because I felt like it), and Shelly (same reason); gave my last three to grandma Miller, mom, and Mrs. H (lady who pretty much made graduation possible).
After that, Heidi (classmate)'s dad addressed the class with a challenge to serve God afterwards. Then the fun part, we get our diplomas. The annoying part was when I first got my cap, it was so big that it wouldn't stay on my head if I moved. That wouldn't have worked. Mrs. H
fixed it to where it would fit. The weight of my tassel kept pulling it down to where once it almost fell right off my head and I didn't even realize it. Mrs. H is telling me to straighten it out. I can't lipread, so I had no idea what was going on. My deaf friend Mike came and he was upset there wasn't an interpreter for him. But hey, it's our graduation, and it wasn't in the agenda to have an interpreter for him as he doesn't go to my school.
Pastor Cooper was telling the crowd of our future plans: we have probably half the class (of 8) that wants to go into elementary education. Wallie's going into youth ministry, Nathan's going into computers, Brian got a $5,000 scholarship for auto mechanic school, PC said I'm going to try getting ASL certified then doing deaf ministry (it's such a neat and strange field I was the only graduate to get applauded for it), and my female best friend Shannon is going into computer/media to do websites.
After that, the ceremony was finished. Rae sang, "God be with You till We Meet Again". One by one, we went, retrieved our candles, on the top step, blew it out, and proceeded to the junior girl that issued it, and symbolically passed down our senior status to them.
Following the ceremony, I had a small party with a few of my relatives.
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