“You got here when?” That’s the stunned reaction we got when we told people we had arrived at 6:30 in the morning to save seats for certain families. My good friend David Humphrey ‘61 and I pull this stunt every year because, well, because we’re crazy. I’ll admit to that. But neither of us would miss this annual ritual, even though some people get rather testy when they discover that most prime seats have already been reserved. Ah well, the early Polar Bears get the seats.

The Bowdoin Commencement is one of the highlights of my year. Let me explain. There’s nothing like standing among two rows of alumni and clapping as seniors march by in their caps and gowns. And then, as a graduate, marching through two rows of clapping seniors. Everyone seems moved, even the males, young and old.

I reflect a bit while parading around the campus quadrangle and through the two lines of students. There’s Searles Hall where I had my first class at Bowdoin at 8:00 a.m. one September morning, not the best time to learn physics from an absent-minded professor who’d long passed his should-have-retired by date.

And there, across the street, is the First Parish Congregational Church, where my grandfather William B. Kenniston (Bowdoin, 1892) delivered the Class Poem at Commencement in 1892 and where the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in 1964, my senior year. And there, to the left of the path, is Pickard Theater. My great-grandfather George B. Kenniston (Bowdoin,1862) is listed on a plaque in the lobby of Pickard, which honors Bowdoin students who fought in the Civil War.

Farther along is Massachusetts Hall, where as a Bowdoin freshman, I signed the President’s book. A few years later, my college roommate and I would hit golf balls down the path leading to Massachusetts Hall, trying to miss the trees.

Then, farther on, stands the Chapel. I attended a Religion class in the Chapel on the day John F. Kennedy was shot. Years later, in 1989, I got married in the Chapel. My parents, separated for 24 years by that time, sat together in the first pew during the service. And then Appleton Hall where I lived my first-year, joyously joining water fights with Hyde Hall.

Finally, a right turn towards the Walker Art Building and the long-reserved seats.

As I paraded through the two lines of graduating seniors I spotted several familiar faces: our host student whose younger sister had died three years earlier; a student from Newark who called Tina and I her “white grandparents”; two students whose grandfathers had been in my class at Bowdoin; two students for whom I had given “mock interviews” at the Career Services Office; five members of the Bowdoin women’s basketball team, of which we’re big fans; a student who had so impressed me when I met him three years earlier that I told him he would eventually win a class office and a post-graduate fellowship (he did both); and a student who’d delivered a fine rap poem during a class I audited this spring who, it turns out, delivered a fine rap speech in her capacity as senior class president.

The actual Commencement ceremony is sometimes anticlimactic for me, but the ceremony this year was exceptional: the student speakers, the honorary degree recipients, the President’s message, the music, the tone, the weather, everything.

I’m not sure what the next year will bring, but I know that I will arrive at the Bowdoin Commencement in 2018 bright and early and ready to march. Count on it.

David Treadwell, a Brunswick writer, welcomes commentary and suggestions for future “Just a Little Old” columns at dtreadw575@aol.com.