My 20-year retrospective of columns continues. Here is my first, from all the way back on Aug. 16, 2001. Boy, did I have to fight the urge to make all sorts of changes to it before posting here.
It was usually the first Tuesday in September, the day after Labor Day and the beginning of the school year.
I would be wearing a dress shirt and a new pair of Levi's so stiff that they could stand up by themselves. Breakfast had been eaten, teeth had been brushed, and notebooks, pencils and lunch bags had been collected neatly by the front door.
As the time to board the bus drew near, I started to wonder: Is this the year, the very first year, that I'll escape?
Wishful thinking.
At the last possible moment, Mom popped up like some demented Jack-in-the-box at the front door, camera in hand, ready to take The Photo.
"First day of school, gotta take a picture!" she would chime.
My sister and I knew the drill. Stand together — by the door or, weather permitting, on the front porch — mug for the camera and look excited about resuming our formal education.
While hair length, height and location would vary from year to year, my expression seldom did. There I am in first grade, a surly young punk in Middlebranch. There I am in high school, a surly young punk in Homeworth.
Sometimes, Mom snapped The Photo so late that I could hear the air brakes of the bus hissing just down the road, and I prayed, hope against hope, that the yellow roof wouldn't pop into view before The Photo had been taken, subjecting me to the ridicule of my peers — surly young punks whose parents probably took pictures of them each year, too.
I got on the bus with stars in my eyes, visions of flash cubes, not sugar plums, dancing in my head.
The first-day tradition didn't end with my senior year of high school. No, as a college commuter, I was subjected to the Photo for four more years.
"I'll never do this to my own child," I vowed.
Liar.
Our daughter, Malori, will start the fifth grade on Tuesday. Counting kindergarten, this will be the sixth time that my wife and I will request her presence in The Photo.
She handles the picture with much more grace than I ever did, smiling and holding up a sign that will tell us, when we are old and infirm, what grade she is entering. We even went high-tech last year, when I began printing out banners from my computer with fancy graphics of school buses and books.
And I should point out that after all these years my mom has been vindicated. The latest issue of “Family Fun” magazine lists several ways to help your children get a good start this school year, and taking a first-day-of-school photo is one of them.
Here I always thought it was an obscure form of torture. Turns out Mom was a visionary.
And that’s a photo finish.
Wishful thinking.
At the last possible moment, Mom popped up like some demented Jack-in-the-box at the front door, camera in hand, ready to take The Photo.
"First day of school, gotta take a picture!" she would chime.
My sister and I knew the drill. Stand together — by the door or, weather permitting, on the front porch — mug for the camera and look excited about resuming our formal education.
While hair length, height and location would vary from year to year, my expression seldom did. There I am in first grade, a surly young punk in Middlebranch. There I am in high school, a surly young punk in Homeworth.
Sometimes, Mom snapped The Photo so late that I could hear the air brakes of the bus hissing just down the road, and I prayed, hope against hope, that the yellow roof wouldn't pop into view before The Photo had been taken, subjecting me to the ridicule of my peers — surly young punks whose parents probably took pictures of them each year, too.
I got on the bus with stars in my eyes, visions of flash cubes, not sugar plums, dancing in my head.
The first-day tradition didn't end with my senior year of high school. No, as a college commuter, I was subjected to the Photo for four more years.
"I'll never do this to my own child," I vowed.
Liar.
Our daughter, Malori, will start the fifth grade on Tuesday. Counting kindergarten, this will be the sixth time that my wife and I will request her presence in The Photo.
She handles the picture with much more grace than I ever did, smiling and holding up a sign that will tell us, when we are old and infirm, what grade she is entering. We even went high-tech last year, when I began printing out banners from my computer with fancy graphics of school buses and books.
And I should point out that after all these years my mom has been vindicated. The latest issue of “Family Fun” magazine lists several ways to help your children get a good start this school year, and taking a first-day-of-school photo is one of them.
Here I always thought it was an obscure form of torture. Turns out Mom was a visionary.
And that’s a photo finish.
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