The Class Of 2006 Now And Forever

Creating a community is patchwork. The entire creation is almost never completely unfolded for everyone to see. The view afforded any one individual or group of individuals depends on their inclination toward or away from community involvement. But even the most involved citizens see just a patch here and a patch there, stitching together their own sense of the community from isolated experiences at work, at play, in common cause, or isolated purpose.

Only at big community events, like the Labor Day Parade, the lighting of the Christmas Tree in the Ram Pasture, and in recent years at the phenomenally successful Relay For Life fundraiser for the American Cancer Society, do we get to take a bigger view of our community. But no event shows individuals their place in the overall patchwork of Newtown better than the graduation ceremonies at Newtown High School.

On Tuesday evening, 354 NHS graduates received diplomas at commencement at the O’Neill Center on the Westside Campus of Western Connecticut State University, and there was the usual circumstantial whooping and hollering and shenanigans to go with the ceremonial pomp. At graduation, the informality of family and friends pours out into the formality of recognizing and certifying success in our community’s main public enterprise: educating children all the way from the apron strings of childhood dependency to the life lines of independence: college and career.

Our high school commencement exercises are the place where we gather separately as families and collectively as a community to stitch the names of individuals permanently into the great evolving quilt that is Newtown. With luck, we will find their imprints in this patch or that of community life as years go by. But even if the diverging paths of these 354 young men and women carry them far from our town, their place as a part of Newtown is now and forever secured as the Class of 2006. We offer them our sincere congratulations.