by bsquared5@aol.com | Feb 23, 2015 | Thoughts
The calendar reminds me it’s time for school pictures this week. I take a deep breath because our family has a bit of a history here. With technology’s advances, photos are as ubiquitous as sunlight or, say, leggings on a college girl. Selfie actually became a real word a couple of years ago in the Oxford English Dictionary. But it wasn’t always so.
When I was in grade school, unless a parent or teacher had a camera in hand, with actual film in it that required developing and processing, we didn’t get many pictures of ourselves, and certainly not ones we could see immediately. School picture day was a big event. We dressed nicely, combed our hair, and tried to smile sweetly.
It would take weeks before our pictures came back, and when they did, it was as exciting as receiving a yearbook in high school. Everyone compared head shots. We carefully snipped the sheets of the 3×2 wallets and exchanged them with each other like baseball trading cards, writing a small note on the back of each one: “To a Good Friend, Stay fun!”
Some of my childhood friends moved to different cities and the last memory I have of 
them is their wallet-sized school picture, frozen in 4th grade forever. Inevitably, every school year couldn’t be as cute as that one with the toothless grin in first grade. In fourth grade, I conveniently broke out with a case of cold sores–all over my face. Also, that was the day I wore the flattering bright yellow sundress my mother made me. All my friends who moved away that year have that lovely image to remind them, forever, of me.
Then there was 7th grade, everyone’s most graceful and poised year of life. Until then, I had fine, straight hair that hung limply around my face. After months of begging my mom for a perm, I got one alright. My rounded Afro frizzed around my head like an electricity experiment gone wrong. 
Oh, and that was the year I got braces. Mercifully, I thought to remove the humiliating headgear I had to wear with them before the picture was snapped. Headgear apparently was a leftover of torture from the Middle Ages: a metal bar that wrapped around your face, attached to your back teeth, and harnessed around the back of your neck by a velcro strap. And, again with the mustard yellow color. It wasn’t until the late 80’s that the Color Me Beautiful concept came around and I learned that yellow was not, and never would be, my color. It made me look as if I were just getting over a nasty stomach bug. Seventh grade was not my finest moment.
My husband had a classic school picture, too. His was captured in 3rd grade, when he apparently was having a bit of a bad hair day. There’s a note in his childhood scrapbook, written by his mom, that reads, “didn’t think to tell mom we were having pictures made.” That might explain the Lassie shirt and his seemingly stunned expression.
With our sad history of school pictures, I was determined to shepherd my children through the pitfalls of forever having such images represent themselves. When my daughter turned 11, she deemed the day her long-awaited “Golden Birthday.” 
No idea where she came up with this, but apparently turning 11 on the 11th is somehow your life’s one magical date. (I guess I missed the significance when I turned 14 on the 14th; no magic for me.) Turns out, her magic day fell on picture day. Imagine my surprise when the pictures finally came back and I realized she’d chosen to immortalize the moment forever by way of a tiara. Future students leafing through the old school yearbooks will not be aware of her reasons and will just imagine she was 6th grade royalty. Perhaps this was her plan all along. Why didn’t I think of that in 7th grade? Then again, the tiara would have been swallowed by my giant hair.
Sadly, my son’s Golden Birthday will not come until he turns 26, long after the school picture opportunity has passed. He has never taken picture day seriously. It has always 
been a barrage of reminders to please comb your hair and try a decent smile. In fifth grade, it wasn’t just his own self portrait that he decided to flub. He managed to wait for just the right moment in the class picture to be a goof. Yep, that’s him in the blue shirt looking like Bill the Cat from the Bloom County cartoon. The other parents, when they received this little gem, may have been startled by what appeared to be the child choking in the back row.
I was thinking the other day that, now that homeschooling is on the rise, many students will be able to escape the ignominy of school pictures. And with all the digital technology available, at the very least, they could photo-shop out the weird kid in the back row of a group shot.
Despite the embarrassment at the time, I kind of like having the old school pictures available. I can show my kids that I wasn’t always the specimen of beauty and coolness that they envy today. Everyone is weird. Everyone has been humbled, hated the way they looked, did something dumb, had a period of awkwardness. It’s a universal path that all of us must walk. The edited, filtered, photo-shopped selfies of today are just an illusion. I love Colbie Callait’s song “Try” because she says it’s okay to be real, genuine, messy, and likable anyway.
That’s why, towards the end of my kids’ school years, my favorite pictures have turned out to be the ones where their silliness and fun outweigh their outfits or hair or smiles. It’s why, when I pulled out my 7th grade picture and warned my son to shield his eyes and not look at it directly, we both shared a laugh at just how awful it was. We’re just keepin’ it real, people.
by bsquared5@aol.com | Nov 30, 2014 | Thoughts
During our Thanksgiving meal this year, huge flocks of black birds rose and fell in a choreographed, synchronized dance in the field outside our window. It’s that time of year here. They are migrating south, stopping for respite in bare cornfields along their route. If you’re driving, you can see the power lines drooping with the weight of them, looking like musical notes penned in the sky. Trees bare of leaves appear full again, until with some secret signal the hundreds of birds posing as foliage fly away as one, de-leafing the tree in one fluid movement.
We remembered the old nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence, where four and twenty blackbirds were baked into a pie that apparently was good enough for the king. My daughter, the picky one, predictably wrinkled her nose and declared she wouldn’t eat that. I just smiled to myself. There was a time when I would have said the same thing. Heady with the audacity and arrogance of youth, I made lots of similar proclamations of things I would never do, wear, say, or eat. In time, my “crow pie” would be repeatedly served to me steaming and piping hot, beaks bursting from the crust.
In my teens and twenties, the world was my orchard, fruit ripe on the tree ready for my haughty hands to deign to pluck it. We were a large, middle class family, and I never wanted for anything, really. The fact that in junior high, my mother wouldn’t buy me a pair of Jordache jeans that cost more than our week’s worth of groceries I chalked up to her stubbornness and lack of fashion rather than any financial reality. I took lessons at the local rec center: baton twirling, horseback riding. If I could’ve combined the two, I probably would have tried because why not? Couldn’t the world use more sequined girls twirling batons on horseback?
But, the best laid plans of mice and men, as Robert Burns says, oft go awry. I once had a showdown with my high school physics teacher as I dropped his class in favor of an English class more to my liking and abilities. “I’ll never use this stuff!” I told him. My first job out of college: science writing. Then, I got married and so many of the things I said I’d never do seemed to be swept down the aisle as fast as my white heels could traipse. I’ll never iron a man’s shirt; he’s got two hands. When you’re home for the day and he’s rushing out the door to make an appointment at work, how mean spirited would it be to just sit with your judgemental cup of coffee, declaring “you should’ve thought of that yesterday”? The compromise and give-and-take of married life was something I’d never imagined at seventeen, or twenty-two, or even sometimes now in my mid-forties. “I’ll never,” “I won’t,” “That’s not my problem,” are statements of petty selfishness that do no one any good.
Then came children and all bets were off. I’d never go a day without a shower and being presentable. Big mouthful on that one. I’d never let my child scream like that in a restaurant/airplane/grocery store/church service, etc. I’d never sit my kid in front of the TV so I could have a moment of mental sanity. Chomp. I’d never let my child walk around without shoes/pants/diaper/tissue applied to nose/scrubbed cherub cheeks at all times. Crunch. I’d never drive a minivan. Open the hangar, here comes the airplane. I was always going to be put-together, classy, with well-behaved, polite, scrubbed children. How hard could it be? Did Jackie O. ever have to catch a child’s vomit in her bare hands? Did Grace Kelly ever open her palm for someone’s chewed gum?
I’d be modest and in control at all times. During my firstborn’s birth, I vomited repeatedly and didn’t care who was in the room. “Students? Bring your friends, just get this baby OUT.” I’d always have the same metabolism I had at twenty-three and would never “let myself go.” I see now it’s not a deliberate “letting go” at all. It’s more of a desperate plea: “Wait! Don’t leave me!” I had a mammogram a couple of years ago, and the tech said something that never gives you warm fuzzies at your annual exam: “Well,that’s weird.” She invited me to come behind the monitor and look at the picture that had somehow appeared on her screen upside-down. For a second, I was elated. “That’s the perkiest the girls have looked in about 15 years!” I said. From then on, I always request my mammograms be viewed that way. It just makes me feel better.
I would always have cute shoes. Well, heels are just out. Don’t even bring them in my house any more because I can’t wear them without being crippled within 30 minutes. The word of the day is comfort, ladies. I can work with that, except for some days when I apparently can’t manage to pay attention long enough to put them on so that I leave the house with a different shoe on each foot.
After looking at old photos of my mother-in-law, I once remarked to her that I would never dye my hair. It was just so fake and not who you really were. (I know. Can you believe? If I were her, I would’ve broken up with me then and there.) My mother was prematurely gray in her 20’s. I was totally asking for it. So, between you, me, and my hairdresser, I’ve had two or three entire pies for that one.
It took a long time (I’m a slow learner), but I’ve stopped making blanket declarations. Learning this is a lot like making bread. You add things to the dough a little at a time, folding in the ingredients and kneading them together gently but firmly, letting the dough get used to the new bits. You sit it aside and give it time to rest and rise. And, if you’ve done it right, when it comes out of the oven lovely and browned, the product is much, much better than what you started with. Something worth sharing with others, even.
Over the next forty years if I’m blessed to have that many more, I hope I’m a lot more gracious, a lot less judgy. I’m racking my brain for things I’ve said I’ll never do when I get old and trying to take them all back. Plastic surgery? I’m game! Cruise ship to the Netherlands? Sign me up! Babysit for large numbers of grandchildren at once…..well, ok.
I want to be flexible, open, teachable. The more you know, the more you know how much you don’t know. I’m sure there are things I know for certain right now that will only be rendered laughable in a decade or two. So, be patient with me. And save me a piece of that blackbird pie.
them is their wallet-sized school picture, frozen in 4th grade forever. Inevitably, every school year couldn’t be as cute as that one with the toothless grin in first grade. In fourth grade, I conveniently broke out with a case of cold sores–all over my face. Also, that was the day I wore the flattering bright yellow sundress my mother made me. All my friends who moved away that year have that lovely image to remind them, forever, of me.
Oh, and that was the year I got braces. Mercifully, I thought to remove the humiliating headgear I had to wear with them before the picture was snapped. Headgear apparently was a leftover of torture from the Middle Ages: a metal bar that wrapped around your face, attached to your back teeth, and harnessed around the back of your neck by a velcro strap. And, again with the mustard yellow color. It wasn’t until the late 80’s that the Color Me Beautiful concept came around and I learned that yellow was not, and never would be, my color. It made me look as if I were just getting over a nasty stomach bug. Seventh grade was not my finest moment.
My husband had a classic school picture, too. His was captured in 3rd grade, when he apparently was having a bit of a bad hair day. There’s a note in his childhood scrapbook, written by his mom, that reads, “didn’t think to tell mom we were having pictures made.” That might explain the Lassie shirt and his seemingly stunned expression.
No idea where she came up with this, but apparently turning 11 on the 11th is somehow your life’s one magical date. (I guess I missed the significance when I turned 14 on the 14th; no magic for me.) Turns out, her magic day fell on picture day. Imagine my surprise when the pictures finally came back and I realized she’d chosen to immortalize the moment forever by way of a tiara. Future students leafing through the old school yearbooks will not be aware of her reasons and will just imagine she was 6th grade royalty. Perhaps this was her plan all along. Why didn’t I think of that in 7th grade? Then again, the tiara would have been swallowed by my giant hair.
been a barrage of reminders to please comb your hair and try a decent smile. In fifth grade, it wasn’t just his own self portrait that he decided to flub. He managed to wait for just the right moment in the class picture to be a goof. Yep, that’s him in the blue shirt looking like Bill the Cat from the Bloom County cartoon. The other parents, when they received this little gem, may have been startled by what appeared to be the child choking in the back row.