A sunlit field in Santa Cruz

The graduates paraded in as “Pomp and Circumstance” thundered over the loudspeakers.

As we were ready to leave, Bill asked me where the dog was, and we got in the car and raced down to Castro Street, where I had left him tied to a post outside the deli.

I wasn’t excited or anything. Graduation for Morgan’s college at UC Santa Cruz — Kresge — was on the East Field, a sunny expanse overlooking Monterey Bay. Stands selling bouquets lined the walk to the field, and I bought flowers, though Jim, her dad, was carrying some. Bill, in blazer and tie, kept nuzzling my neck and congratulating me, as if I had done something.

“All I did was keep her from dropping out of high school,” I said, remembering her fervent pleas to be allowed to go to her loser boyfriend’s continuation school, among other schemes, and the columns and the forthcoming book I had written about the struggle. “The rest of it she did herself,” I reminded Bill. Morgan went to summer school so she could take off an occasional winter quarter to go snowboarding. She took a College Abroad class in Amsterdam, on political theory, arriving in class in the morning fresh from the beer halls, trying not to be irritated at the teacher for repeatedly waking her up with an emphatic statement about French politics or the English parliamentary system.

She did not learn so much as forcibly extract her education from her bewildered, often delighted, sometimes overwhelmed teachers. She sat in front, hand waving wildly. She stalked the professors across campus and accosted them during office hours. Not given to solitary pursuits, especially reading dense philosophy tracts, she pounced on her classmates and got them to tell her what they had learned from the texts she had not herself got around to buying. One teacher told her she would be an excellent teacher herself, “if you thought you could sometimes let other people talk.”

At the ceremony, my sister Robin and I went to find Morgan in the long line of blackrobed graduates waiting for the processional. There she was, smiling, with a purple lei around her neck, and wearing red sandals. Next to her was her friend Jean-Marie, who had balked at shelling out the $30 rental for the robe and instead was wearing red pants and a belly-baring T-shirt.

I switched shoes with Morgan, and Robin and I went back to our seats. Others in the audience held up kids’ names scribbled on signs, as if they were meeting them at the airport after a journey — as, in a way, they were. I saved a bunch of chairs, putting flowers on one, a program on another, then my mother’s sweater, then my paperback copy of “My Antonia,” and had to stop when Patrick wouldn’t give me his shirt to hold another seat. We were expecting Morgan’s friends, and Trevor’s parents, and then I might make some new friends before the ceremony, because it was that kind of day.

I opened my program and scanned to the H’s. There it was: Right between Diden Zeynep Havlioglue, majoring in literature, and S’rai L. Helmbrecht, majoring in environmental studies was “Morgan Heig, philosophy major, journalism minor.” The graduates paraded in as “Pomp and Circumstance” thundered over the loudspeakers. My college-bound niece Katie, 16, looked on, storing up images of what graduation looks and feels like. I stood on my chair, trying to see Morgan through a blur of tears, and passed my camera down to her dad, who was sitting at the end of the row.

Afterward we stood in that bright field taking pictures. Robin grabbed Morgan’s cap from Mother, who was parading around in it, and plopped it on her own head. “When one of us graduates, we all do,” she said, sidestepping as Mother lunged to get it back. It was a scene bathed in warmth and sunlight, one of those bright moments that you remember forever. Forgive me for having gone on about this, but many of you have been here, reading along, during Morgan’s tough years, and I thought you might like to know.

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on June 20, 2000.