"Sweet Caroline" | UW-Madison 2024 Spring Commencement

[@babycakes1402]

Just saw these guys for their spring concert, ALWAYS an incredible job! Congrats Seniors 👨‍🎓👩‍🎓

[@johnglover3682]

I take it back. It wasn't "Sweet Carolin" but his song "Coming to America." I remember thinking, "I'm an American and I'm in England, and the weather was a curtain of extra tiny rain drops but very dense and it was cold, you know the stereotypical weather England is known for and that returning to America wasn't too far back in my mind considering the weather. I returned in August. But I found it ironic that I had come to England, an American, and Neil Diamond was singing "They come to America, Today, Today, Today."

[@johnglover3682]

Of course "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond is a great song. I remember I was in a small restaurant somewhere in Earl's Court in London, England in 1984, when over the restaurant's speaker this song started to play. Every time I would eat at this eatery during the drizzily days of mid-May, exactly 40 years ago this week, (it was cold and drizzily for a week and I almost left London on People Express $159 one way back to Newark, NJ.) "Sweet Caroline" would play. My first thought was "how do they know I'm an American," and then, I'd realized it was a popular song all over the world. They weren't playing it just for me. But who would have thought these guys from UW would have the guts to sing it acapella at their 2024 graduation, where I ended up writing for two days the bar exam at the law school in July of 1990. So as I drink my red wine cabernet and contemplate my fifth trip to Ukraine since the war started, and these marvelous men, I raise my glass to the Madison Class of 2024 and congratulate all of you. It can be a safe journey or it can be one filled with bizarre adventures. And remember: Though much is taken, much abides; and though, We are not now that strength which in old days, Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.