Several reasons.

I had failed some classes because I couldn’t keep up with the reading and stupidly didn’t realize that there was a drop-date before which you could drop a course without penalty. And I foolishly thought I could catch up but never did. And I was lazy.

Also, I was shy and awkward around people and hadn’t made enough interactive friends to hang out with to feel a part of my generation, the students my own age.

So the class I entered with graduated without me, and I had to take an extra year to make up units, and didn’t feel a part of the new class that was a year younger. To them I was an older man.

Also, since I was married and a young father, that’s where my life was. I didn’t need to hang out with juveniles who were still looking. Some still haven’t found what I found early.

And my social life was largely with those others in married student housing just a little off campus, where babies played together, and we lived next door to foreign students and visiting professors. That was our neighborhood, having graduated by marriage out of the dorms. It was as if I had skipped adolescence altogether.

My close ties were to the school, the professors, individual friends, but not my generation which had already graduated and the new crop included but did not represent me. I didn’t belong to them.

And graduation entails fees, extra money I didn’t have because every penny was family spoken for.

And I’m not big on ceremonies anyway, all that pomp and circumstance, hours of sitting through speeches designed to send you into a life I was already leading.

So I didn’t go to the ceremony where they probably read my name, and I picked up my diploma from the office.

But I made up for it. Years of teaching, so many high school seniors, and I went to every graduation, wore the teacher’s cap and gown, shook the hand of every student crossing the stage, even if they hadn’t been in my class, but I knew most of them anyway, and I got emotional, because I loved them all and each year sent the hope of the future out to make a better world, which I hope to live to see and share with them.

I’ve gone to graduation many times, and though retired, I’m still teaching however I can, and every new generation is mine.