[Author’s note. This is a reprinted blog posting from June 2008]
I was bored Friday night and decided to rummage through the closet for things to donate on Saturday to the local charity thrift store. As I was sorting through old college notebooks and receipts I came upon a cardboard tube with my name on it and inside was my diploma. I had never gotten it framed partly due to circumstances and partly due to laziness.
It was early December of ’93 and I had just cleared my library record, I had settled all my accounts on campus and I had gotten clearance from the registrar to graduate. I went home and sneezed as I was cleaning my apartment since my parents were coming for the graduation. That was the beginning of a three week-long flu bout.
By the next morning I could hardly get up. Heavily fortified by NyQuil and pig-headed determination I somehow attended the graduation ceremony and stumbled across the stage to receive my diploma and then went home to lie in bed for most of December.
The diploma lay forgotten in some moving box. I was out of college but poor as a church mouse and living on credit cards as I tried to find a job, so framing a diploma was the least of my concerns.
Couple years later, I’ve got a job and I wander into a framing shop and they quote me 60 bucks for framing it. Being lazy and needing to save money for vital things (aka going out and drinking) I put it off.
So it’s 2008, I take it out of the tube to look over. There’s a slight crease along the side of the diploma from the graduation when I, half out of it due to the Nyquil and the fever, took the diploma out to look at it and then jammed it back in the tube hard.
On reflection, graduation should have been one of my proudest moments. Not just for the occasion but due to the fact that I received my diploma from Michel Halbouty and shook his hand. Who is Michel Halbouty? He’s the last of the great Texas Oil men. It would be like an engineer receiving her diploma from Thomas Edison or an art student receiving his degree from Leonardo da Vinci.
In any case, I finally took the diploma to a framing shop and found that success does indeed have its costs, as does laziness and procrastination. There were frames to pick, backgrounds, different types of glass, and in no time a 60 dollar frame job turned into 390 dollar job and will take 2 weeks to be done.
The diploma will be custom fitted, sealed and protected from the elements in a dark red cherry wood frame with gold edging on a maroon and white (the school colors) background. Normally I don’t like conspicuous display, I find it vulgar. However, some things do deserve to be displayed and some things are worth showing off. This now sits in my home office. The only decoration in the room.
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