I don't mean to whine, but ...

- High school and college graduation season is over now, and I must admit I’m relieved.

We cover these events primarily so you, the readers, will have something to cut out and put in your scrapbooks. Otherwise, graduations pretty much define the statement “Everyone who cares was there.”

But I do enjoy the youthful exuberance, the proud parents and the sense that this is not an end but a beginning, that one person can make a difference, that this is the first day of the rest of our lives
and …

Sorry — I just had a flashback. I covered three graduations this year.

I can even tolerate the graduation speeches, even though they all say pretty much the same thing.

What really sets my teeth on edge is that song. Pomp and Circumstance.

It’s a pleasant enough melody, but here’s the problem — it only has one stanza, which gets played over and over and over, like a CD with a nick in it. If it’s being performed by an earnest but unpolished high school band that keeps hitting the same flat note each time around, it’s even more abrasive.

Even the Wedding March has more variety.

I’ve learned that the reason this song first gained a foothold, like a deer tick, in the graduation tradition was that Yale music professor Samuel Sanford decided to honor his friend, British composer Edward Elgar, with an honorary degree. This necessitated the performance of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March,” and somebody forgot to turn it off. It’s been playing ever since.

So let’s have some suggestions. What might be a better graduation theme song? Something by Beethoven? A Sousa march? Or how about “Free Bird,” which would seem particularly apropos?

- Normally, I don’t have any complaint with the Virginia Department of Transportation. They build our roads, and they fix them, and I applaud that. I don’t think I’d want to be driving my Toyota Camry cross-country through fields and woods, and it’s not amphibious.

A recent article by my colleague Carrie Sidener, however, left me disappointed with the VDOT folks. It concerned the placement of homemade memorials on the side of the road to people killed in traffic accidents.

In a very real sense, these displays of emotion are similar to the items left at the Vietnam Wall — flowers, personal items and letters.

“That was the last earthly touch Kristy had,” said Wayne Overstreet about a small memorial on U.S. 460 at the spot where his daughter ran into the back of a tractor trailer and was killed instantly. “That’s the last place she was.”

In 2002, the General Assembly passed a law prohibiting any roadside displays not approved by VDOT, which primarily means a plain black and white sign. Anything else risks a $100 fine.

The problem with that is, it robs grieving family and friends of the opportunity to place their own tributes at the site.

Donna Purcell-Mays, a VDOT spokeswoman, told Carrie that the temporary memorials could pose a safety hazard for drivers, “particularly if they block views or the material is blown into the roadway.

“The standardized black and white memorials are less distracting than temporary memorials because as people become familiar with seeing them, they look only for the name on the separate sign.”

I’m not sure I buy the “dangerous distraction” argument. How many other things are put out by the side of the road to distract us? How about the high school kids hawking car washes? The neon-intensive temporary roadside signs? These days, more and more, the Vegas-style invitations from churches?

The first roadside memorials I ever saw were alongside the steep highway between Guatemala City and Antigua, a winding road up a sheer mountain with few guardrails.

“What do those flowers mean?” I asked the man sitting next to me, reading out of my Spanish-American dictionary.

He made a sign of the cross.

Most people would whiz right past yet another black and white sign, true. But a quick glance at a heartfelt display of love and loss might provide a twofold message: “That person was loved, and I don’t want to end up the same way.”