It's commencement time in my family, and maybe in yours. Here's to the Class of 2024

My older niece graduates from college next week.

I'm having a little trouble wrapping my head around that.

I had arranged to be back in the town where I grew up in time for her arrival back in May 2002, but she was in a hurry. My mother called hours before I could get away, and as soon as I answered I could hear Abby wailing in the background.

"She's letting everybody know she's here," Mom said.

She's been ahead of the game ever since.

I began my first tour of duty at The Herald-Mail that December, and I had exactly 24 hours off for Christmas. My family was four hours away. So allowing for travel through the mountains on Interstate 68 and nausea-inducing back roads west of Morgantown, W.Va., I had 16 hours for Abby's first Christmas.

And even that was cut short as I had to leave early and travel back to Hagerstown through a snowstorm. But I wasn't going to miss her first Christmas.

Was it worth it?

I have a photo of her sitting on my lap in the middle of a mound of gift-wrapping debris to prove it was.

When she was 2, I hoisted her up to my shoulders so she could see the bands and the floats in the Mummers Parade. I wrote her a fairy tale for her fifth birthday, and another one for her 13th. We traipsed around the Maryland Renaissance Festival in the rain — twice — and I stood in a queue for what seemed like eternity at Disney World so she could fly with the elephants on the Dumbo ride.

And I can still see the gleam in her eye when we boarded a roller coaster at Cedar Point.

I hugged her tightly as she cried when my father died; she was 10 then, the same age I was when I lost my own grandfather. She gave me a pair of earrings that Christmas that I've worn more times than I can count; I noticed them in the case this morning, a little tarnished but still beckoning.

She and other members of the collegiate class of 2024 graduated high school in 2020, the year of broken dreams. No prom, delayed commencement ceremonies with limited guests, senior year frivolities all cut short. The reservations I made for the graduation trip I'd promised her when she was in elementary school were canceled. For various reasons, we haven't gotten to make the trip yet.

But despite everything, she has thrived. She accumulated scholarships, worked part-time around her classes and managed to excel at all of it. She already has a job and is planning for graduate school.

I can't help thinking she and her classmates, who had so much to overcome, deserve so much better than the world my generation has left for them — a world where truth no longer matters, where leaders have no shame, where even the "righteous" have succumbed to the idolatry of politics.

Up is down, light is dark, logic is elusive.

What have we done?

I am afraid for her. I always have been. Her mom and dad told us she was on the way on Sept. 8, 2001. Three days later, I wondered whether we'd make it to her due date.

Post-millennials have been through the wringer. Don't call them snowflakes.

And yet, she persisted. If anyone can find her way through this morass, she can.

Back in the dark ages when I walked out of my college commencement ceremony, her great-grandmother beamed at me. "I'm bettin' on you," she said. I often wonder whether I've lived up to that expectation. But I know Abby will.

Congratulations, Princess. I'm bettin' on you.

Now go change the world — and let everybody know you're here.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Commencement season is here. What awaits the Class of 2024?