On Tuesday, our family (along with a couple of Mason’s friends) gathered around a television to watch the Yukon class of 2020 graduation ceremony. The online ceremony (streamed on Facebook) was the last of a series of events designed to celebrate this year’s graduating seniors, in a world where celebrations as we knew them have been put on hold.

Celebrations began on Saturday with a parade of seniors. About half of this year’s graduating class took to their cars and did a lap around Yukon. Parents and friends lined the streets to wave, cheer, and support this year’s high school seniors. My family and I sat in chairs along Route 66 in support of the kids. It was no substitute for kids hearing their name and walking across a stage to applause, but it was something.

To support the seniors, Morgan and a few of her friends from band gathered with their instruments to play alongside the parade.

On that same day, a local sign company began displaying all 600+ seniors’ picture in rotation on several of their electronic billboards around town. By sheer luck, Susan and I only had to wait a few minutes to catch a picture of Mason on display.

On Sunday, family and a few friends joined us on our back porch for a small gathering to celebrate Mason’s achievements. Susan arranged to have tacos delivered from Ted’s, but the smallest amount of food we could order was ten times what we needed, so the bright side is we will be eating leftover Mexican food through July. A few of Mason’s classmates stopped by to toss around a football and play Frisbee, which just shows you how desperate kids are for social interaction at this point.

Monday night was “Seniors on the Mill,” where the school projected every senior’s picture onto the side of the Yukon grain silo. Susan, Morgan and I met some friends of ours and sat in chairs in a parking lot, watching the pictures go by. Each picture received varying levels of applause, whistles, and car honks. This gathering definitely had a small town feel to it, and that’s okay. Lots of seniors turned out for the event, and in many cases it was the first time some of them had seen one another since the week of spring break back in mid-March.

And that brings us to last night, when the official graduation ceremony was streamed for people to watch. Graduation was led by the school’s principal and featured three short speeches from graduating seniors, all of whom appeared alone behind a podium. After the last speech concluded, “graduation” consisted of a rapid-fire slideshow where each graduating senior was displayed on the screen for about three seconds.

Mason and his friends clapped and cheered for their classmates as their pictures scrolled by.

Susan cried.

If I could summarize the graduation festivities for the class of 2020, I’d say a bunch of parents who didn’t know exactly what do planned a bunch of things and did the best they could to honor their kids. As a kid, I didn’t really understand how big of a deal graduation was — and I suppose graduation has always been as much for the teachers and parents as it has been for the kids. Graduation is a defining moment where you can pause, applaud, and tell your kid, “you did it.”

Mason, I know a parade, some pictures on a silo and a PowerPoint presentation streamed on Facebook isn’t the same as walking across a stage and receiving your diploma, but no matter how we celebrated the event, buddy… you did it.

Yesterday, Mason turned 18 years old. Let that sink in for a moment. I know it hasn’t quite sunk in for me yet.

Last year on Mason’s birthday, I reminisced about all his previous birthday parties — the ones that took place at inflatable jump houses and arcades and bowling alleys.

This year for Mason’s birthday, our extended families took him out for dinner. Tomorrow night, he’s having some friends over to play video and computer games. For his birthday, he asked for a 3D printer. Earlier today, he attended a college tour at the University of Oklahoma.

Things are changing quickly. I thought Susan would be the one needing support during this transition, but I’ve had butterflies in my stomach for the past three days. I’m happy, sad, excited, nervous, but most of all proud.

We’ve got a few more months before Mason graduates from high school and everything really begins to change. I know he’s ready for it. I don’t know that I am, just yet.

There are many kinds of pride. You can be proud of your country, the things you own, or the things you’ve done, but there’s nothing quite like the pride you feel when your kid does something super awesome.

Since turning sixteen, Mason has been donating blood and platelets at school each time the Oklahoma Blood Institute (OBI) visits. Last week, Mason was contacted by the OBI and informed that his blood was used to save a man’s life during a liver transplant. The man, Ronald Black, was scheduled to speak at OBI over the weekend, and the staff wanted to surprise him by introducing him to Mason on stage.

Mason was the one who got the original text, who passed most of the information on to Susan, who subsequently related a little bit of the story to me. To be honest I was a little skeptical of the entire thing. For starters, I thought blood donations were anonymous, and did not believe a specific donation could be traced back to an individual donor. (I was wrong; it’s more of a “double-blind” system.) I also wasn’t sure why Mason, of all donors, had been selected to be honored. (I’m still not entirely sure about that second part; I think our proximity to OBI had something to do with it.)

Mason, Susan and I, along with several other family members, arrived at the Oklahoma Blood Institute on Saturday. After arriving, we were directed to the waiting room and offered snacks and drinks while we waited. After a short wait we were led from that room into the main conference room. Ronald Black was already up on stage, delivering his testimonial. We did not hear his entire story, but we heard enough of it: “three months to live,” “liver transplant,” “eight units of blood.”

At the end of his speech, one of the people in charge informed him that they had a surprise for him. That was when they brought Mason up on stage and introduced him as one of the donors who had provided the blood that saved Ron’s life. There was not a dry eye in the house, from the two people on stage to all of us in the audience.

Mason said a few words into the microphone and suddenly they were asking his parents (me and Susan) to join them on stage. I have to say that Susan and I had no expectations or intention of going on stage — Mason was the hero, after all — but after a bit of coaxing, we did.

After just a few minutes, we exited the stage and made our way out to the lobby. Both Mason and I noticed a difference in the way people were looking at us when we came in vs. when we had left. I’m sure on the way in, everyone in the room was wondering who these people were who had come in late and were sitting against the wall; when we left, everyone in the room knew exactly who we were, and Mason received many high-fives, handshakes, and pats on the back as we left the room.

The best thing about Ron Black’s story isn’t just that he survived his liver transplant. Ron now works for the Oklahoma Blood Institute, and Yukon High School is part of his area. Ron plans to visit the school this December for the school’s blood drive, where I’m sure he and Mason will meet once again.

Susan wasn’t the only O’Hara with a birthday last week. Last Friday, Morgan turned 14.

I turned 14 in 1987. Life were different back then, but not that different. When I think back to being 14, I think mostly about wanting to fit in. I don’t mean wanting to be like everybody else, but wanting to find people who were into the same things I was into. It was about finding people who liked the music I liked, the computer and video games I liked, and the movies I liked. There was a lot of trial and error — friendships that didn’t work out, and friends with whom I shared a couple of those interests but not all. And then I had friends like Andy, and Jeff, and Justin, people I shared all of those interests with, and, not coincidentally, people I’m still friends with today.

Even with advances in technology, I still see Morgan going through many of the same things. She has her school friends, her band friends, her Girl Scout friends, and some online friends. She may not be friends with some of these people next year, and she may still be friends with some of them in 30 years. As a parent, one of the most exciting and rewarding things is to watch your children develop their own personalities.

Tomorrow, Morgan is headed to camp for a week, where she will likely make new friends, and most definitely enjoy some temporary freedom away from her parents.

Mason turned seventeen years old on Wednesday. To celebrate, several of our family members came over for pizza, lasagna, a piece of cookie cake, and some ice cream.

I didn’t sleep well the night before Mason’s party, and woke up Wednesday morning just before 5 a.m. I arrived at the office just before 6 a.m., worked hard on a project until 4:30, picked up the cookie for Mason’s party a little after five, and made it home roughly five minutes before our first guests arrived. It was a long day, and by the end of the evening I was wiped out.

It wasn’t until I was in bed and the lights were out that I began to process the day. Thinking about Mason’s seventeenth birthday had me reminiscing about his sixteenth birthday at EightyThree Arcade, and how excited Mason was to get his driver’s licence and first car. With my eyes closed, memories of each of his previous birthdays came flooding back. There was the party he had at Incredible Pizza when he turned ten (which he loved), and the one he had there when he turned fifteen (which he decided he was too old to be doing). There was the year we got floor seats to a Thunder game. There was the year we went to Jump Zone, and the year we rented the mini-golf place in Crossroads Mall just months before it closed for good. I thought about the Xbox cake I made one year (the one with black icing, that turned everybody’s poop black), and the year of the ridiculously butchered Rubik’s Cube cake. I thought about each of our (now three) houses Mason has celebrated a birthday in.

And then, lying still in the darkness, I came to the end of the memories. I reached December, 2000, the last Christmas we celebrated before Mason was born. It was a fine year; everybody came over and we had a family holiday gathering, but laying there in bed, thinking about that night, it all seemed hollow. How could we have known what we were missing, and how much our lives would change the following year? In the folder where I keep all my digital pictures, I have 13 photos from Christmas 2000. From the Christmas of 2001, two weeks after Mason was born, I have 207.

Still in bed, I tried to remember the Christmas of 1999, and couldn’t. Surely we did something? I tried and tried to remember what we did that year, but couldn’t come up with anything.

Happy Birthday, Mason. Mommy and I had a life before you were born, but it’s getting harder to remember it each year.

“Dad, do you need to go to 7-11?”
“Dad, do you need to go to the post office?”
“Dad, do you need to go to the store?”

Guess who turned fifteen-and-a-half last week and got his learner’s permit?

(This is a staged photo. Mason will never drive the STI.)

When Mason turned fourteen he got a license to drive a motorcycle, and for roughly a year and a half he’s been riding to school and around town on two wheels. I grew up riding motorcycles, as did my dad, but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch your kid leave the house on one. Having him surrounded by two tons of metal and airbags will actually be a relief.

The process of obtaining a license has changed since I originally got mine. To get a learner’s permit in Oklahoma today, you need to have completed (or be enrolled in) a driver’s education course and provide proof that you are enrolled in school, among other documents. When you turn sixteen and have had a learner’s permit for six months, teens can then apply for a intermediate license. It’s similar to a driver’s license, but with a few restrictions. With an intermediate license, teens can only drive between 4:30 a.m and 9 p.m., and can only carry one passenger that does not live in their home. To obtain that license, teens must be enrolled in school or have their GED. After another six month period, assuming the teen did not acquire any traffic convictions, they can apply for an “unrestricted class D license.” Each license sets you back about $40. (Link: DMV.org)

Even though Mason has been mobile for over a year, “four wheels” is new. His stops are abrupt, his acceleration is uneven, and his turns are inconsistent. That being said, the second trip was better than the first, and the third was better than the second. He knows the rules of the road, but being behind the wheel of a bigger and heavier vehicle takes getting used to.

Riding in the passenger seat of your own car is a bit like riding in the front car of a roller coaster at the fair, if it were being operated by someone not old enough to operate it. The pit in your stomach never fully subsides. Like the roller coaster, you tell yourself nothing bad will happen, but you give the safety equipment an extra tug, just in case.

“Dad, do you need a ride to the convenient store?”

And, we’re off!

In February, Mason made a poor decision and decided to leave his closed campus school for lunch, along with ten of his classmates. (Juniors and seniors are allowed to leave for lunch; freshman, like Mason, and sophomores are not.) When I was in school, kids who left campus usually did so to smoke. Not my kid. My kid got caught going to Little Caesar’s.

The kids’ path led them out the backside of the school and through an adjacent parking lot, where a police officer was waiting for them. To teach the kids a lesson, the officer cited each of them for trespassing — again, for walking across a parking lot. And when I say “teach the kids a lesson” we know the kids are not paying this fine.

Trivia Fact #1: A ticket for trespassing in Yukon, Oklahoma is $325.

Trivia Fact #2: $325 x 11 = $3,575.

When Mason came home that evening with his tail between his legs, Susan took a look at the ticket and noticed that it had the wrong address written on it. The kids had been at west Vandement, but the ticket said they were trespassing at east Vandement. This was our ace in the hole!

Trivia Fact #3: Once, after receiving a ticket in high school, I threw myself at the mercy of the court. I told the judge that I couldn’t afford the ticket, much less a hike in insurance rates. I told him I was sorry, and that my parents had already grounded me. I believe the judge’s response was, in not so many words, “Who cares?”

Susan and Mason went to court in March. Mason pleaded not guilty, and the judge said “come back in April.”

On April 11 (Tuesday), Susan and Mason returned to court, along with dozens of other Yukon teens, including ten others who had been cited for trespassing.

When the judge asked if Mason or Susan had anything to say, Susan asked to have the ticket dismissed based on the fact that the address on the ticket was incorrect, and listed a location Mason could not possibly have reached on foot during his lunch period.

I believe the judge’s response was, in not so many words, “Who cares?” The officer then attempted to immediately amend the citation.

Trivia Fact #4: Having the wrong address on a trespassing citation does not automatically void it in Yukon, Oklahoma.

When the judge asked if Mason had anything else to say for himself, he said that he had already received detention from the school, been grounded from his motorcycle, and had to do a week’s worth of yard chores around the house. The judge said “I think these things are better dealt with at home,” found Mason guilty, and dismissed the fine.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose. I can’t help but think back to all the times I remember kids skipping school when I was a kid. Kids talked about the truancy officer as if he were a bogey man in a suit capturing kids with a giant butterfly net. I remember kids leaving campus and walking across the street to Dairy Queen to smoke and bum cigarettes from customers. Back then, when kids got caught doing this they were either slapped on the wrist or dragged back to the school by their ear. I don’t remember anyone ever getting a $325 citation for trespassing.