"Graduates of the Class of [FILL IN YEAR],"

My grandson returns tomorrow, so I'll squeeze out one or two more 'blog articles before he takes the keys away and sends me back to the home.

Here goes:

As April turns to May, I begin the painful task of sorting through all the invitations to deliver stirring commencement addresses. The schools always schedule their graduations for the same two weekends, drastically limiting the number of engagements I can accept and ensuring that too many institutions of higher learning will be getting thin envelopes from me in the next week or so. They never learn.

Anyways, I take the whole commencement address thing very seriously. A commencement address should push the youngsters out of their nests, synthesize all the nuggets of knowledge they've been gathering into a Unified Theory of Life and permit the kids, for one brief shining moment, to bask in the reflected greatness that is moi.

Sure, some speakers pander to the children by telling jokes, spewing vulgarities, acting "cool" and "with it" and peddling empty-headed affirmations. That's exactly what the kids don't need at this crucial stage in their lives, as we kick them off the gangplank and into the sea of Responsible Adulthood. For an example of what not to do in a commencement address, I suggest studying Conan O'Brien's 2000 Harvard Class Day speech, a particularly vile example of this sort of excrement.

So, what sort of wisdom should one impart at such an august occasion? Over the decades, I've developed a stump commencement address -- it has little colored blanks where I insert the name of the school, the graduating year and the name of the school's president -- that's guaranteed to get those heads nodding in agreement. You'd be amazed at the enthusiastic responses I get -- students frequently nod so vigorously their caps fall forward and they need to rest their chins on their chests for long periods of time. Others sit still, eyes closed in deep concentration as they imprint my words into readily accessible spots in their still malleable brain tissue.

My commencement address is copyright and proprietary and all that, so I'm not going to share it with you. You'd just take it, undercut my honoraria and pretty soon you'd be getting all my invites.

But it does trouble me to think of all the deserving students doomed to aimlessly meander through life without the benefit of my words, just because their schools refused to accommodate my schedule by moving graduation to August or a Tuesday night. For you, the almost doomed but not (yet) hopeless graduates of years past, I offer these core Words of Wisdom designed to turn your miserable lives around and set you on the True Path of Responsible Adult Living:

Look before you leap, for he who hesitates is lost. You've been educated to do great things, so get out there and do them -- after all, studies have shown time and again that actions speak louder than words and the pen is mightier than the sword. I've found that haste makes waste, but time waits for no man, so act accordingly. Whether you plunge into the great stream of commerce or ascend into the ivory towers of academia or descend into the bowels of our great professions or find yourself watching Oprah as a stay-at-home mom wondering where your life went wrong, you won't be able to avoid dealing with other people, so remember that many hands make light work and too many cooks spoil the broth. Let's not forget relationships, much as we might like to. As a veteran of three marriages and more affairs than I can count, I draw upon a deep well of experience when I tell you that absence makes the heart grow fonder and out of sight, out of mind.

It continues on like that for another 25,000 priceless words, but you get the idea.

(Dictated but not read)