Note: This came (a few weeks ago) from a reader and friend whose family reached out to embrace and be embraced. We couldn't have said it better!

In our family, how we choose to celebrate, publish, dread or assiduously ignore major milestones is less grounded in obvious traditional absolutes now that the elders have all passed to the other side. In our sights is the high school graduation of our middle son, Addis, from Garfield High School. The question for us arises in two parts -
• how shall we properly celebrate this?
• who is there left to tell? Who is part of Addis' family?

Other than the obvious milestone this represents for him as he leaves home, there is an urge to mark this for me, the mother, (and aren't medals and diplomas finally for mothers?). It is all tangled up in the not quite year anniversary of Addis' last grandparent, my mother's death. Now I am the conductor of the ceremonies in our family, and this particular commencement commemoration seems more connected, if I were to be completely honest, to a yearning for the warm, semi-public, undifferentiated embrace that is afforded young high school graduates, regardless of scholarship or athletic prowess, by, say, a small town, perhaps the small town I grew up in.

There, the seasonal rhythm of the adult calendar naturally seemed to accommodate the academic, thespian, and sport calendars of the burghers' children. This was typically done with a variety of multi-generational blends of gas station little league sponsorships, library books-for-all drives, and Rotary essay contests for seniors.

In our family's case, there was also the donation of what was valuable and on hand - a luxuriously fattened heifer - brought daily to the center of downtown Napa by one of Grandpa's remaining ranch hands in the run up to the drawing - aboard a mini pasture-on-wheels! There, on this platform, sat Addis' maternal grandmother, incongruously sitting at a card table with kids underfoot, in stockings and pearls. With her Stanford Law degree and a straight face, she would unsentimentally sell raffle tickets to raise money for the children and families in that same town who didn't have what they needed.

I remember this as a place and a time that has not translated forward precisely, yet this failure has done little to diminish its seminal imprint. Our family now has embraced, in perhaps a make shift, immigrant way, all of you as family members - members of our created community here. On the cusp of the new millennium, in the corner of the country that we chose, where we chose to raise our children, we have also chosen to make (collect, it you will) a family for them and for us.

And now this young man, a product of two coasts and cultures, raised thousands of miles from aunts and uncles and grandparents, some of whom he never knew, is, by the agency and virtue of a mother's prerogative announcing that this phase is drawing to a close.

Thank you all who loved him well, whether from up close or from afar. You have helped us raise him to this point by giving us vagabonds room in your warm communal embrace. Thank you! (Martha Kongsgaard, mother of Addis)