PLUS YO! AND OTHER CHANTS FOR THE FUTURE

“I ruined my hat!”
The speaker was my daughter Lauren. The hat was her graduation cap.
“And I burned my leg!”

This was Thursday night; we would be leaving for her college graduation in twelve hours. She was sitting crossed legged on her bed finishing off the application of letters to the top of her cap. She was using her curling iron as the source of heat.

There were so many things wrong with this picture that I did not know where to start. The look on her face told me to say as little as possible. I choose,
“Let me see it.”

And this is what I saw.



Now maybe it was the placement of the button, but all I could focus on was the word “URE.” I kept staring at this half quote half math problem and I was unable to get past “URE.” As the night progressed and Lauren’s siblings and friends converged for dinner I was shown I had missed the boat.
“Plus Yo! It is the Plus Yo, that makes it art.”

The plus sign had been used in place of the word and or an ampersand. She had used from her education the earliest interpretation of the plus sign.

The quote is from Theodore Roosevelt, “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” An understanding that a positive attitude was the foundation for success. Positive.

It made me think about this girl, this daughter, this woman. She had single handedly financed her education attending two colleges in three states all the while maintaining the goal of graduating in four years. She had believed she could and she succeeded.

I considered how during these years she had been a positive force for every company that had employed her, an addition to all the families that had embraced her as babysitter, confident and friend. How she had been a plus in all of our lives.

She had not ruined her hat. She had made herself the perfect graduation cap.

We sat as a family at the IZOD center watching, waiting to see her in the procession. Her bright eyes and brilliant smile signaled that she had seen us.

Unplanned and unrehearsed we all yelled “PLUS YO!” She couldn’t hear the shouting, it was for us. To serve as a reminder of how lucky we are to know her.