I had not planned to stop in that town at all. I was sixty years old, driving a truck that smelled like cold coffee and old road maps, and I was only passing through on my way to see a man about a piece of farm equipment I did not really need. The turnoff came because I was hungry, and because the sign at the county line promised a diner two miles ahead, and because at my age you learn to trust a full parking lot the way you trust an honest handshake. I have thought a hundred times since then about how close I came to driving right past that exit. If I had, I would still be the man I was before, and I would never have known what I was missing.
The town was small enough that the whole thing felt like one long main street with a school stapled to the end of it. There was a feed store with a hand-painted sign, a church with white siding and a steeple that leaned a hair to the left, and a war memorial in the little square with names on it going back further than I wanted to read. It was late May, and the whole place had that scrubbed, hopeful look that small towns get on the day something important is about to happen. Banners hung from the light poles. Somebody had strung balloons on the fence outside the high school gymnasium, and they were bobbing in the warm wind like they knew a secret.
I parked, and I ate, and I should have left. But the waitress at the diner, a woman about my age with reading glasses on a beaded chain, told me the whole town was headed over to the graduation and asked if I had somebody walking. I told her no, I was just passing through. She looked at me the way people look at a man traveling alone at my age, a little kindly and a little sorry, and she said, “Well, you should go anyway. It does a person good to watch young folks step into their lives.” I paid, I left her a tip that made her smile, and I told myself I would drive on. Instead I found my boots carrying me toward the gymnasium, following the sound of a band tuning up and the murmur of a crowd that had known each other their whole lives.