the Revolutionaries

It's hard to get my head outside of architecture school, and far to easy to lose contact with reality and the world going by outside, so it was not without a great feeling of "what? how can they be graduating?" upon the realization that I needed to buy tickets to go to my brother's and mother's graduation.

My brother, whom my parents were deeply concerned with whether or not he would even be admitted to ASU, has graduated summa cum laude, a distinction, I might add, that I did not attain. I have seen him mature so much in four years both intellectually and socially- becoming the man I knew he would become. Now, Taylor is preparing for another quantum leap- come fall, he will be attending the 23rd best law school in the country. If he was crawling before he went to ASU, he graduated striding purposefully, but now he will have to full out run. But he can do it. He has the combination it takes to succeed- the razor sharp intellect, the warmth and charisma, and the determined drive; if he engages with law school, the engine that is Taylor will blow us all away.

These three years have been a different kind of challenge for my mother. I already knew she had the determination and the rationality and the intellect that would make her a great lawyer, but she had to re-learn that she possessed these qualities, and she had to overcome her fear of alienation as a later-in-life student where the average age would be half of her own age. And she did fantastic. Not only did she make many friends across the age spectrum, she also had stellar academic achievements- most notably her willingness to be lucky combined with great writing skills which brought her a position on the Law Journal and later as a note-and-comment editor. She has worked incredibly hard and she has done it. Now, like Taylor, she faces a new challenge which I am confident she will overcome. A new program, in a strange new place, filled mostly with accountants as she begins work on her tax LLM.

Two revolutionaries. Leaving their victories in Phoenix behind, they take their fights onward....