It is Friday, June 12, at 10:00 AM. Yesterday was The Double Event. Yesterday was Acalanes. Today is Miramonte.
This is the part of commencement week that the Lafayette parents don’t fully see and the Orinda parents have been planning for since April. Acalanes goes Thursday night at Memorial Stadium. Miramonte goes Friday night on its own football field — not a borrowed stadium, not an evening at the high-school-down-the-hill, but the Mats’ own field, with the Orinda hills going gold behind the visitors’ bleachers and the BART line rumbling in the distance about every nine minutes. Campolindo’s turn is Saturday afternoon. Each school gets its own night. That is the AUHSD compact, and it has been honored since approximately forever.
Here is what Miramonte Friday actually looks like, from the Orinda side of the tunnel.
6:48 AM — The Field Setup Begins
At 6:48 AM, a small crew of facilities staff and a slightly larger crew of parent volunteers are already on the Miramonte football field setting up roughly 580 white folding chairs in formation. The chairs are stored in the equipment shed at the south end of the field. The chairs come out every June and go back in every June and are not used for anything else. There are exactly two parents who know how to set up the front row correctly — the front row is angled three degrees toward the podium, which is not obvious unless you’ve done it before — and one of them is the parent whose senior is graduating today, and who is on the field at 6:48 AM because they would rather be busy than be at home pacing.
The field-setup parent is the one who texts the group thread at 7:14 AM: “Field looks good. We’re ready.” The other parents on the thread know what that text actually means. It means: I needed something to do this morning and now I have done it. Nobody comments on this. They send back the right emoji.
8:30 AM — The Theatre Square Coffee Audit
By 8:30, Theatre Square — the Art Deco block around the Orinda Theatre at the BART end of Camino Pablo — is doing its Friday-of-Miramonte-commencement business, which is a different rhythm than its normal Friday business. The grandparents are at the patio tables. The college roommates who flew in last night are at the indoor tables. The grad-night parents are not here because the grad-night parents are at home doing the gown logistics. The grandchildren-doing-the-grandparent-duty (see also yesterday’s Lafayette Lunch Audit) are at the tables in between, on their phones, being patient.
The coffee at Theatre Square on Miramonte-commencement Friday morning is sold to a demographic that is roughly 40% over 65 and 80% wearing some blue and gold, which are the Miramonte colors, which means the kelly green of an Acalanes hoodie that wandered in by accident is visible from across the patio. That hoodie belongs to a cousin from Lafayette who is here for moral support of an Orinda cousin and who picked the wrong sweatshirt off the hook this morning. The Orinda grandparents will notice the hoodie. They will be nice about it. They will also, quietly, enjoy noticing it.
10:11 AM — The Caldecott in Reverse
This morning, the Caldecott Tunnel is running the opposite direction than it usually runs. Normally, Friday morning at 10 AM is eastbound-empty, westbound-recovering. Today, on Miramonte commencement day, there is a small but real westbound surge into Orinda — Lafayette-side grandparents who slept at a Lafayette hotel last night for the Acalanes commencement and are driving over this morning for the Miramonte ceremony of a different grandchild. The double-commencement grandparent is a real Lamorinda category and there are roughly forty of them this week, and they are, this morning, going through the tunnel west at the exact hour the eastbound side is usually doing the heavy lifting.
The double-commencement grandparent will spend approximately two minutes in the tunnel and emerge on the Orinda side blinking. The two minutes in the tunnel is not the geography. It is the transition. Lafayette-grad-energy and Orinda-grad-energy are different. Lafayette is bigger campus, bigger stadium, more bleachers, more announcement-by-zone. Orinda is smaller field, lower bleachers, the BART rumble, the hill-behind-the-end-zone. The grandparent knows both now. The grandparent will, at the party tomorrow, say so out loud, and the parents on both sides will nod.
11:24 AM — Loard’s Stocks the Quarts
At Loard’s Ice Cream on Brookwood, the afternoon staff arrives at 11:00 AM and the first job of the day is checking the quart freezer for the weekend. Loard’s has been on this block for seventy-plus years, and they have learned that commencement Friday afternoon — the hour between ceremony done and dinner started — produces a small, sharp, predictable run on quarts to go, because somebody in every other Miramonte family decides, around 6:45 PM, that what the relatives at the house really want before the catered Saturday party is a quart of mint chip and a quart of vanilla and a quart of whatever-grandma-likes. The Friday-after-ceremony quart pickup is the quietest Loard’s window of the weekend, and the staff know to keep three of every flavor stocked through 9 PM.
This is the kind of pattern you only learn by being here a long time. The Orinda parents know it. The grandparents are about to re-learn it.
1:55 PM — The Miramonte Parking Lot Reality Check
At 1:55 PM, the Miramonte parking lot is closed — or rather, it is reserved for staff and a single ADA-only row — and the families coming for the 5:00 PM ceremony are being routed to off-site parking. The off-site parking, this year, is a combination of: the Orinda Community Center lot, the back overflow lot at the Orinda Country Club (by arrangement, ADA-priority), the public lot behind Theatre Square (BART validates differently for Miramonte night — known issue), and a long quiet stretch of neighborhood street parking up Moraga Way that the Orinda Police have unofficially blessed for the evening, provided nobody blocks a driveway. The neighborhood-street option is the Orinda local move — you walk a quarter-mile downhill to the field at 4:30 PM and you walk a quarter-mile uphill at 7:30 PM and your knee tells you that was the trade.
A first-time Miramonte parent — somebody new to the district whose oldest is graduating this year and who did not get the email about off-site parking — will, at 4:14 PM, drive directly into the Miramonte staff-only lot and be very politely turned around. This happens every year. It is somebody different every year. It is one of the six well-known commencement-day events that the AUHSD parents talk about at the Saturday parties for the rest of the weekend.
3:30 PM — The Gown-and-the-Walk
By 3:30 PM, the Miramonte senior is in the gown and walking out the front door. Several Orinda streets, between roughly 3:25 and 3:55 PM, have a very specific phenomenon: a senior in a graduation gown, the parent walking three steps behind with a phone out, and the neighbor across the street watering the lawn who has paused the hose to watch them go past. The neighbor and the parent make eye contact. The neighbor says “good luck tonight, Maddie,” without looking up the senior’s name on a list, because the neighbor has known this senior since she was three. The senior waves. The parent’s eyes get a little wet. The neighbor goes back to the hose. This whole transaction takes about eleven seconds and it is, structurally, the single most Orinda moment of the entire calendar year.
This does not happen on the Lafayette side the same way. Acalanes families spread across a bigger geography. Miramonte families are clustered around the hill. The walk to the car, on Miramonte-graduation Friday, is seen by the neighbors. The neighbors know. That is the difference.
5:00 PM — The Ceremony Begins
Miramonte’s commencement starts at 5:00 PM sharp on its own field. The field is set up with the graduates facing west, which means the late-afternoon sun is in their eyes for the first half-hour of speeches. (The Class of 2026 is wearing sunglasses under the mortarboards. The principal will mention this in the welcome.) The valedictorian’s speech mentions the band director who retired last year, the senior trip to Yosemite, the teacher who wrote three hundred letters of rec without complaining, and a sentence about the pandemic year that everyone has stopped expecting and is therefore moved by. The speech does its job. The principal’s list of seniors is read in full. Each name gets a separate, contained, audible cheer-from-a-specific-corner-of-the-bleachers, and the parents next to that corner can tell, by the shape of the cheer, exactly which extended family it came from. The Garcias cheer differently than the Wongs cheer differently than the Hendersons. After fifteen years of Miramonte sports nights, you know the cheer shapes.
Sunset behind the western Orinda ridge tonight is at 8:34 PM. The ceremony will end around 7:00 PM, which means the last forty minutes of commencement happen in the gold hour — the field lights are not on yet, the sun is dropping behind the hill, and the gold light coming sideways across the field is the single most photogenic light of the entire Miramonte calendar. Parents who have done this before know to put the phone down for the last twenty minutes because the eye sees it better than the camera does. Some of them actually do this. Most of them try, and last about four minutes, and take one more photo, and that one is the one that ends up framed.
7:18 PM — The Walk to Theatre Square
After the ceremony, several Miramonte families walk — walk, because it is genuinely walkable — from the school field down to Theatre Square for dinner. This is the Orinda commencement-walk and it is one of the underrated things about Miramonte graduation. Acalanes families, last night, drove to Postino or Roxx on Main, because Lafayette’s downtown is too far from the stadium to walk. Miramonte families walk. Twenty-eight minutes, all downhill, the senior still in the gown, somebody carrying the mortarboard like a handbag by 7:24 PM, the whole group moving in a slow procession past the streetlights coming on along Moraga Way. The walk is part of the evening. The walk is, for a lot of families, the part they remember, and the dinner is just the part where they sat down afterward.
At 8:15 PM, the reservations at Casa Orinda, Shelby’s, and the Orinda Theatre’s neighbor patios are seating Miramonte families in waves. The grandparent toasts happen between 8:35 and 9:10 PM. The same chemistry teacher comes up. (It comes up every year, at every school. There is always a chemistry teacher.) The senior — sneakers visible under the gown, gown unzipped, mortarboard on the back of the chair — looks at the parent across the table at 8:47 PM. The parent looks back. The Orinda version of the index card has done its job, except the Orinda version is not an index card, it is a Post-it on the dashboard of the Subaru. Same job. Different surface.
9:42 PM — The Field Goes Quiet
By 9:42 PM, the Miramonte field is empty. The 580 chairs are not yet stacked — they will be stacked tomorrow morning, by a different parent crew, because the Friday morning parent crew is at the dinner. The bleachers are dark. The hills behind the end zone are silhouette. The BART line is still rumbling — BART runs until after midnight on Fridays — and the sound of a train pulling away from the Orinda station carries up the hill exactly the way it did in 1998 and 2007 and 2015 and every Class of 2026 senior’s childhood, and they know the sound, and tomorrow they will be one degree further away from it.
The Single Sentence of Friday
Approximately 580 Miramonte families, between 10:38 and 11:14 PM tonight, as the dishwasher starts and the gown goes on a hanger and the senior closes the bedroom door:
“Okay. Now Campolindo tomorrow, and then it’s done.”
That’s the sentence. Friday is the Orinda Friday. Saturday is Campolindo’s afternoon ceremony at their own field, and Saturday night and Sunday are the grad parties, and then commencement week is officially over, and Lamorinda exhales, and the geese at the Lafayette Reservoir — who slept through Acalanes and slept through Miramonte and will sleep through Campolindo — remain unbothered, correct in their own framework, through all of it.
The town shifts west across the tunnel for a day. That’s what Friday is. Lafayette had Thursday. Orinda has Friday. Moraga gets Saturday. And then summer — real summer, camp-Monday-morning summer, Sun Kings-Thursday-night summer — gets to be the whole story for ten more weeks.
But tonight, on the Orinda side of the tunnel, the field lights came on at 7:08 PM, the gold hour landed at 7:24 PM, and 580 Miramonte seniors turned their tassels at 6:51 PM. The neighbor with the hose watched the walk. The grandparent at Theatre Square cried into the chardonnay. The senior took off the mortarboard at 8:47 PM and put it on the back of the chair, not the floor. That is the difference between Friday in Orinda and Thursday in Lafayette.
That, and the gold light. The gold light is Friday.
See also: The Double Event (Thursday, June 11) · The Double Eve (Wednesday, June 10) · Saturday: The Party · Orinda Theatre · Moraga Commons.
