School Photos
My wife has a good policy: don’t say your kids full names on this here blog or on your social media. She has guided me away from sharing some photos. These are good policies. I follow these policies and I might have arrived at them on my own because it just makes sense. I aspire to share my life with a lot of people I don’t know, on this blog, also on the radio, in the songs I write, in the person I am. But I can’t make that choice for my daughters and I work to not make it for them. My wife Rachel is a good guide for this. We are figuring it out on the fly, we will make mistakes, but our heart is in the right place.
But if I could show you one photo it would be S’s first grade school photo. There is an unbridled courage in this photo that I am glad I will fail to put in to words. She wears glasses but not that often at home, needs them for screen, needs for reading. And like all glasses on a six year old, they are comically large even though the good people at Target optometry say they’re the right size. I have some bond with the glass-wearers of the world. Both my parents wore glasses. My wife wears glasses. My people wear glasses. I was close to 20/20 during the “do you need glasses” years so it never hit for me, but I’ve always felt a kinship with the bespectacled. These glasses are perfect on her. They are perfect on her in their “a little too bigness”, they are perfect on her in a way where it still looks like she borrowed her mom’s glasses for a laugh around the dining room table.
When you see a portrait photo of an adult part of what you wonder on is that conversation between the photographer and the subject. Was it warm? Adversarial? Did it aspire for a level of intimacy the actual photo couldn’t match? But in this photo the parameters of the conversation feel clear, simple and resolved. I presume S was brought in to the room they do the photos in. She’s smiling ear to ear, she likes cameras. They tell her “smile” cause they tell everyone to smile, she tries to paste an additional smile upon her pre-existing resting smile face and the results are in the photo. She has her necklaces just right. Her hair is looking good. Maybe the teacher helped her out before she went in. And her shoulders stand steady, not so prominent that they look unnatural, but with none of the world-weary curve that has bent second graders and older however infinitesimally toward the ground. In the photo I see what I see when I interact with S: a fascination with the world as it is and a open mind toward making it better. I see a visual representation of “yes and”. I see that ability to explain some event in the world completely illogically, absolutely incorrect and be absolutely certain in the answer. I see exuberance and I love it. I want it bottled. I want it protected, but I know an overprotected exuberance is a squandered exuberance. As her shoulders inevitably bend a couple quarters of a degree towards the Earth I want the compromises, the disappointments and the heartbreaks to be epic, to be beneficial, to be shaping, to be restorative. And I want to hold this photo and I want the progression of her growth, of her maturation, to be welcomed, and I want the innocence of her first grade photo to be documented.