The Party Starts

Friday night Dee and I went to the Hollywood Bowl and heard a lot of awesome (and sometime incredibly romantic) music conducted by John Williams. It was great.

Yesterday Josh and I went to his graduation party (classmates, tactical officers, and significant others only). That was pretty fun, and gave me some insight into Josh's life. Josh spent every free minute of this last week throwing himself into creating a perfect slide show of all of the pictures of himself and his classmates going through the Academy. The show is a little over 15 minutes long. People really liked it. Last night, when we came home, he continued to work on the slide show. This morning, for several more hours, he continued to work on the slide show. I think that it's sort of his way of mourning, enjoying, and cementing memories in his head of what he's done and the people that he did it with. It struck me that he has never had a year book to commemorate his life, and this is his way of doing it. It's a very Josh way of processing his experience.

The other interesting thing about last night was that the Tac Staff were there and we got to hang out with them and talk to them like normal people. They joked about the same things that we've all been joking about these past six months. All the graduates, at various times through the night, went around and talked to the Tac Staff, Josh included. The interesting thing about Josh was that when he made the social rounds, he went around and apologized for not being better, messing up on marching, and different things that he perceived in his head as being so big and horrible that they negated all the rest of the work he did. The Tac Staff, all separately, had the exact same reaction to Josh's self bashing, they got this vague puzzled look over their faces as if they were trying to figure out what on earth Josh was talking about, and then proceeded to tell Josh that he was one of the recruits that they actually had absolutely no worries about through the whole thing. They couldn't say enough good things about him and his abilities. Sure, there were some recruits that they had been very worried about and had had to give a lot of extra attention to or kick out of the academy altogether, but Josh hadn't been on that list. In fact, the one week that they threw him in there as class sergeant was a week when they had been really busy with other things to worry about and so they threw him in there not because he needed lots of attention but because they didn't want to have to pay a lot of attention to the class sergeant that week. I only hope that Josh heard the great things that they said about him. Some waxed on eloquently too! I don't think that Josh did hear them though, he's got that idiot voice in his head that shouts that he's not perfect far more loudly than what anyone else could ever hope to shout over, even the scary loud Tac Staff. He's going to have to get over that idiot voice if he's going to be a good cop, because it's a profession where lots of mistakes, or at least gray areas, happen.

But whether Josh is mentally healthy enough to be proud of all of his hard work or not, I am proud of it. He really became more of a man these past six months and he succeeded, quite well in some areas, throughout the whole of it. I can't wait for graduation when his family gets to see how marvelous, imposing, sincere, and strong he looks when he gets his badge and is honored for all his hard work. And I sincerely pray that God will bless that night with love, forgiveness, acceptance, and commitment to this career in law enforcement as well, for both Josh and I.