Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 31, 1993 TAG: 9306010221
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Does anyone except Miss Manners still remember those genteel, sartorial conventions? When, in the year, it's appropriate to wear white. When, in her life, a woman can properly don black velvet. Which occasions call for a hat, which calll for an elegantly coiffed bare head.
Last weekend I attended my 20th reunion at Hollins College. There were women there who'd attended Hollins in a day - and a day not so long ago, either - when students weren't allowed to appear in downtown Roanoke in the afternoon without their hats and white gloves.
At least one member of my class, apprised by an older alumna of Hollins' historic sartorial polish, arrived on campus in the fall of 1969 with enough prim dresses, petticoats, and short white gloves to appear be-skirted and be-gloved every day without even doing her laundry until Thanksgiving break.
Alas. Times had changed. By 1969, skirts were no longer required in the classroom, and my friend graduated with all those gloves still wrapped in the box they'd been sold in. No one, not even the one gracious reunioner from the Class of 1923, appeared last weekend in gloves.
It's hard to know how to go forth into a new experience, even when well-known rules seem to apply. Faced with a new opportunity, we seek advice from those who're older, those who've "been there before." And accommodating advisors try to oblige.
But almost inevitably they screw up. How can they not? What worked in the "before" won't necessarily work in the "now."
We're trying, for instance, to give our graduates good advice these days. All over the place, accommodating advisors are saying, Look to your dreams. Work hard. Make your own way, make a change. Consider this the first step on the journey that is your life. Advance boldly, confidently, joyfully.
We might as well be advising our graduates to go out and buy some white gloves.
Not that all the above's not good advice. It is. But is it the advice they need? We don't and can't possibly know what advice they'll need the most. I wish, for instance, that I'd heard from one of my graduation speakers, "Relax! Keep your checkbook balanced if you must worry about something. But, primarily, relax."
It seemed to me, at my class reunion, that that's what we graduates had finally learned to do: relax. To a woman, we looked wonderful. Confident, calm, no longer sweating the small stuff. If one of us had appeared in white gloves - which, these days, would have announced an aberration much greater than "Before Memorial Day?!" - no other reunioner would have batted an eye.
"Doesn't she look wonderful?" That's all that would have been said. That's all that would have been meant.
And there's another thing they could have told us at graduation 20 years ago, but didn't: 42 is better by far than 22; 62 looks better yet. There's something worth looking forward to.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB