I have been to many graduations. The private girl’s school I attended for high school insisted that we wear white for our 1968 commencement, so I sewed my own dress. It was a short sheath, because skirts were short then, and I was pleased with it.

I graduated from college in January, and I don’t think we had a graduation then. I don’t remember. It took me six years to get through college, and I graduated from two institutions at once, and honestly I was just glad it was over. But I do remember graduating from my doctoral program in 1996 with considerable ceremony on a scorching day, all of us sitting on folding chairs in Franklin Field, listening to Tom Brokaw give the commencement address and trying to endure the heat. They handed out little bottles of water to everyone.

I went to work in a self-important private boy’s school, where faculty had to gown and march in for high school commencement, and where all the boys sat on the stage wearing hideous maroon blazers that accentuated their complexion flaws. We faculty sat in order of seniority in the front of the audience, so I was always sitting with Bob the gym teacher on one side of me, and with whoever hadn’t retired or resigned on the other side of me. (I was at that place a very long time. They had good benefits and a matching 401(k) program, and they were around the corner from my house.) (They gave me a nice Windsor chair when I retired.)

The fifth graders at the school where I worked for so long also “graduated,” meaning they sat on the stage enduring an awful slide show of their baby pictures. The eighth graders had a very similar graduation and slide show. Nobody liked any of the graduations except the grandparents (the parents were just anxious). You have to do a lot for the grandparents, because they donate money to private schools like that.

My last commencement before I retired, the trustees were gathering in the hallway, and I was rushing over to the dining hall to join the faculty line, wearing my University of Pennsylvania doctoral robe with the bars on the sleeves and my hood and soft Renaissance-style cap. One of the trustees, an utter type of Old Money wearing a seersucker suit and a bow tie, asked me waggishly, “What are you wearing under that robe?”

I said, “Shorts,” and escaped, glad I was leaving because it was just that sexist the whole time I was there.

However, I still have that robe, hood, and cap in my closet upstairs. I will never wear it again, and I have gotten rid of almost all my sentimental possessions in the last few years, but I will hold on to that robe for the rest of my life. That costume means something to me. I still have the chair, too.

My own child graduated from the school I had attended, and was required to wear a white gown then, too, though now they were making the graduates wear long gowns instead of the short ones from my time, which was pretty funny. And then my kid graduated from university, with a decorated mortarboard, and then from their doctoral program. After the Ph.D. ceremony, my kid knelt down and proposed to their partner, because they were not about to put anyone through being married to a doctoral student on dissertation.

Last year, the grandson had preschool graduation, with a little white academic gown and a mortarboard. It was ridiculous. And yesterday, he had kindergarten graduation.

I met his parents at the front of the school, all three of us in casual clothes because we share a mild disdain for such events but wanted to support our anxious six-year-old in his endeavors. He was very nervous, my adult kid told me. He doesn’t like people looking at him.

We parents all gathered in the auditorium, where the children were arranged on chairs in a wide half circle facing us. Some of the parents were very dressed up. The grandson peered around anxiously until he found his parents, and then started making faces. The principal gave a talk, the classroom teacher gave a talk, and one by one the teacher read out what each child wanted to be when they grew up and then handed them their certificates. My grandson wanted to be a baker. (Last year he wanted to be a construction worker.) And then, the teacher beckoned him forward, and he bunny-hopped across the stage and seized his certificate, to general laughter.

After the kids were dismissed, he ran up and grabbed his father around the waist and buried his head in his dad’s tummy, and then he got my kid to pick him up and he buried his head in their shoulder.

So many graduations. It seems like an awful lot.

I am the person these things are for, I realize. I am the grandparent. As I said to my kid afterward, “It seems like such an abstract statement: ‘I went to my grandson’s kindergarten graduation today.’ Who the hell is this person I have become?”

We went and had cream doughnuts at the coffee shop to celebrate, and as I was walking away from them to run some errands, the grandson shouted after me, “Love you!” at the top of his voice.

I don’t think he has to do this again until eighth grade. I hope I’m alive to see it. That would be nice. I won’t embarrass him any more than necessary.