We had a baby girl.  She was tiny and beautiful and as the parents of a son, she shifted the balance of the universe.  Suddenly, we weren't the parents of a boy, we were the parents of a boy and a girl.

We watched her turn into an adorable toddler.  She took her first steps at eight months.  She walked ten steps across the floor of the porch at her grand parents house, giggling the whole time.  Then she sat down, having proven she could do it and didn't walk again for two more months.

At the age of three, she told me "When you are a grown up you can do whatever you want.  Except murder."

At her first teacher's conference in preschool, we were told that she was the student a teacher waits for their entire career.

When she was five and I was expecting another baby, the nurse asked her "Do you want a brother or a sister?" and she replied "I want a brother so that when my mom dies I get all her jewelry."

Also at the age of five, we took her in for her pre-kindergarten screening.  When asked to count the pennies on the desk, she counted them by twos.  She read the teacher's work sheet upside down and she would've scored above second grade level but she couldn't skip. 

"You can't teach a child to skip," the teacher who administered the test explained to me.  "Either they can skip, or they can't."
When we got home, she asked me to skip for her.  She watched me intently and taught herself to skip that afternoon.

When asked by her second grade teacher what her favorite books were, she said "Well, I really liked A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court  but I gotta go with A Tale of Two Cities ."  Now, it's true that she had only read the children's classic version of those books but the fact that she knew those titles would freak out Sister Peggy tells you more about this kid than who her favorite authors were.

Her fifth grade teacher said he fully expected to see her on the cover of Time magazine someday.

We spent eighteen years teaching her, taking care of her, keeping an eye on her.  We always wanted to know where she was, who she was with, what she was doing and when she was coming home.

Then one day, we took her down to New Orleans and left her there.

It's not like we left her on the corner of Bourbon and Canal, we left her in her dorm room at Tulane University, but still...

New Orleans.

I broke out in hives the day I got home.

That was four years ago.

Jay and I spent this last weekend down in the Big Easy once again.  Katie graduated from Tulane on Saturday.
We had a marvelous time.  We met a lot of Katie's friends and their families.  We went to parties every day, some put on by the school and some by the parents of other graduating seniors.  Tyler drove over from Austin and we all got to hang out uptown in the garden district and downtown and even a bit in the French Quarter, which Katie doesn't like.  It's not her New Orleans, she says.  It's for tourists.

The parts of the city we were in are beautiful and fun and it was hard to believe that less than two years ago a lot of it was under water.  We saw very few signs of the devastation, mostly just a business closed here or an empty building there.  We went nowhere near the ninth ward.  Everywhere we went was wonderful; the French Quarter still looks like a movie set and sounds like the midway at the state fair.  Uptown near the Universities of Tulane and Loyola is as beautiful an urban setting as I've ever seen.  The garden district is filled with enormous old houses that look like wedding cakes.  Everything is green and gorgeous and I've never been in a city that smelled so good in my life.  Everywhere you went you could smell something cooking and everything we ate was the best meal I'd ever had in my life.

The graduation was Saturday morning at the New Orleans Center.  There were several thousand graduates (diploma ceremonies for each college were later), lots of banners and dignitaries, speeches and a jazz band.  John M. Barry, author of several books, was given an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters.  His speech was short and funny.  Then, an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts was given to Ellis Marsalis, a music teacher, whose students include four of his six sons, two of whom you may have heard of--Wynton and Brandford, and Harry Connick Jr.  Instead of a speech, Dr. Marsalis was kind enough to jam with the jazz band for about twenty of the best minutes I've ever heard.

The commencement speaker was Brian Williams and I felt really sorry for him, having to follow that act.  He was good, too.

Katie had told us earlier that she wouldn't be graduating with honors because she hadn't joined any honors programs and she hadn't written a thesis, so we were all surprised when they announced her name and awarded her diploma Cum Laude.  For the rest of the day, whenever we said her name, we added "Cum Laude!"

"You guys have to stop that," she said. "It's really embarrassing." 

Lest you think she was overcome with modesty, she added "It's not even 'magna'."