Life is in small ceremonies. Learning to ride a two-wheeler. Trembling on report card day. Asking for a first date.

Ron Getz and Sevrin Nelson have been denied more than their share of life's ceremonies. But the other day, two friends who spent half their lives institutionalized together participated in the most American of rituals: passing papers on a new home.

Ron is 56 now, Sevrin is 53. They met 50 years ago when they were committed as children to the Wrentham State School for the mentally retarded. They were roommates even then, when both were deemed too slow to learn, too disabled to try.

It's a diagnosis hard to imagine on a sunny winter day as the men dress in crisp, tailored suits of blue and gray, purchased with their discounts from Filene's and Filene's Basement, their employers for more than 20 years.

Their journey to independence charts as much as any graph how far we have come from those dark days when we hid away children like Ronnie and Sev, children we could have helped.

Their achievement, attained with the assistance of public and private agencies, is inoculation against the cynicism that could so easily be inspired by the political indifference and systematic incompetence that today puts so many vulnerable children in Massachusetts at risk.

Help came to Ron in 1973 and to Sevrin a year later when they rode the wave of deinstitutionalization out of a "school" that never taught them to count or expected them to read. In the next few years, they learned to do that and more as adults in the separate group homes where they lived.

The two friends were reunited a few years later with the help of the Newton Wellesley Weston Committee for Community Living, a nonprofit agency founded by parents and activists searching for a more humane alternative for the retarded than institutions.

In 1978, Ron and Sevrin moved into the first of many Newton apartments they would share, with the help of the NWW Committee and funding from the Department of Mental Retardation.

"We always work, every day, very hard," Sevrin says of the years it took for him and Ron to save the $20,000 down payment for the three-bedroom, shingled cottage with the white shutters in Newton Corner that now belongs to them.

Theirs was a real estate closing like no other William M. Noble Jr. has seen in his 42 years as an attorney. Accustomed to young couples purchasing their first home, or older couples refinancing the mortgage, Noble was unprepared for Sevrin and Ron and the entourage of camera-toting case managers, advocates and well-wishers who crowded into his paneled conference room.

"It's invigorating to be part of an occasion like this," says Noble, representing the mortgage lender, Auburndale Co-operative Bank. "These are two of the happiest homeowners I've ever met in my life."

As happy, and as anxious, as anyone who has just signed away a significant chunk of his future earnings. "No more bowling," Sevrin declares at the small dinette in the apartment he and Ron are preparing to leave behind. "No new clothes. No CDs. We've got a mortgage now."

Ron cringes at such sweeping prohibitions. Certainly, his eyes plead, there is money enough for a movie now and then or one more Johnny Mathis disc for the five-CD changer that was, until now, the biggest ticket item they'd ever purchased.

Will they be too broke for the housewarming they've been planning, they ask Becky Gloninger, the case manager who meets with them once a week to help with finances.

Introduced to the concept of pot luck entertaining, the suddenly frugal homeowners look immeasurably relieved. "Good. Everyone bring food. I'm not such a cook," concedes Sevrin, noting that Ron boasts a definite command of spaghetti.

Though freed from the burden of party planning, Ron and Sevrin remain preoccupied with all the decisions facing any new property owner. Ron has chosen the downstairs bedroom -- surgery last fall left him leery of stairs. But so many choices remain: beige or blue for the living room walls? Bare floors or wall-to-wall carpeting? The bus or the train for the commute to work?

Furniture. Appliances. Repairs. "One thing at a time," says Ron, neatly summarizing their latest transition -- tenants to homeowners -- and their lifetime transformation -- patients to taxpayers.

Ed Dailey, one of the lawyers who helped them negotiate the purchase of the house, has promised to help landscape the small lot.

In the fall, he will plant bulbs, perennials as hardy and as full of promise as the two graying gentlemen who will make their first mortgage payment on the first of March.