The magical last week of high school, when even the cats cry

I’m watching my daughter go through the magical last week of high school.

There’s lots of laughing, hugging, crying, recollecting … and that’s just my cats and me.

My mom? Thanks for asking. I just checked with Las Vegas, and the odds of my mom crying herself unconscious during graduation are 65-35 in favor.

High school kids are even worse.

At my daughter’s school the other night, I’m pretty sure I watched a girl’s misty-eyed farewell to an equally misty-eyed girl (even though graduation was six days away and they appeared to be from the same family) turn into two wolves having a howling competition.

I was at my daughter’s final choir performance, and even I got sad, once I realized it was the final time I’d see this group perform. The boys, most of whom don’t understand shirt collars, forget to let blood into the arms paralyzed at their slides and generally look slightly less cheerful than someone standing before a firing squad.

Yet they showed up and did their best, which isn’t easy being in the same group as the inevitable two or three kids obviously born for musical theater. You could sneak into their houses at 3 a.m., playing Barry Manilow’s “Daybreak,” and they’d leap out of bed and begin singing and sleep dancing.

After the performance I thought about my own last week of high school, back in the 16th Century. The feeling of positive wholesale change on the horizon was wonderful, like walking into a new world you owned where anything was possible.

I really was happy for my daughter, because I know she was experiencing that and …

Oh … right. I got arrested during the last week of school.

To be fair, it wasn’t serious - unless you were the fence we used for firewood while camping on a Santa Cruz beach. It was a bit startling when the police officer stuck his head in the tent the next morning and didn’t even have the courtesy to bring energy drinks and protein bars.

We didn’t actually have protein bars in 1985. We got protein from the 25 bacon cheeseburgers we ritualistically ingested every week from an organic holistic nutrition outlet known as Jack in the Box.

As for energy drinks, we called that “Coke.”

No, not that coke. At least not on weekdays. Yet.

I look back at my first arrest (find my new children’s book “My First Arrest!” at a bookstore near you) as a learning experience, an early peak into the inner workings of the justice system.

I now know what a juvenile probation officer looks like. And after we paid the court-ordered restitution, the beachside homeowners got a brand new fence. So, in a way, everybody won.

Even that didn’t kill the glow. All week we hugged and said nice things to people with whom we hadn’t spoken since 7th grade. We hugged teachers. We hugged strangers, - mostly good-looking ones we had no courage to approach for four years.

The last day of school was one of the best of my life. It was like Christmas morning, only without parents at 2:30 p.m. in 85-degree weather. I believed every day would unravel this way, now that I was out of high school (though, to be fair, I had more fun in high school than anyone should be legally allowed to have, which reminds me …).

Anyway, my daughter - whom we’ll call Lucy (because that’s her name) - is the kind of kid for whom life will just get better. She probably will have many more last-days-of-school weeks, because she’s just that type of person (literally; she’s planning to get something like 11 degrees). And the cats and I will enjoy watching.

Who knows? Maybe all that positivity will prompt us to gather new optimism and try finding ourselves some new fire (not the kind you throw other people’s fences in). I know at least one of my cats has been discussing that very topic with his therapist.

Just as all these wonderful things are happening for Lucy, my other daughter is two weeks out on her own in the big city, which is a whole separate amazing feeling. I can tell she’s enjoying the shift.

She left 47% of her belongings behind, something I hope she’ll remember before I move. But she’s enjoying the change right now.

Maybe that’s the key to life: encountering as many fresh and exciting things and enjoying a series of mini-shifts in life. Then, if you go back the way you came, it might feel new as well.

My daughters have a dad to feed, so please consider paying $8 a month to read these columns. Find more nonsense in Tony’s book “Lying Drunk,” available from Barnes & Noble at https://bit.ly/46xoaJJ or Amazon at https://a.co/d/cYNCUPp).