This past Tuesday, all the moms and dads at the school yard had their phones out photographing their children before sending them off to the first day of school. The school even had a faculty member out on the playground with a polaroid camera, so the children could carry a picture of them and their parent into school that day with them. How awesome, right? What a cool, little, but very special thing to offer to these children. I immediately loved everything about the idea, but my son when asked if he would like a photo to bring into school, abruptly said No!
Orrin had been telling me all morning while getting ready for school.. at breakfast; "Mom, I just don't want any pictures today." while getting dressed; "Please mom, no pictures." putting on his shoes; "Mom, I hope you know I'm sorry, but I just don't want any pictures today." walking to the school; "No mom, not even one." I didn't push him. I just kept saying it was okay, we had a small conversation about maybe just one for me and to send to his Bubbe and his response was, "you and Bubbe don't need a picture of me today." He's right.
Bubbe and I don't need a picture to mark the day that Orrin first started first grade. We don't need it to continue to live a healthy life, or to be good people, or to be thought of as good parents and grandparents. We don't need it. He's smart for a six year old. Yet he is only six years old and doesn't see life with 'aging eyes perspective'. Oh it's a thing, through my eyes he's six and one year from now he will be seven and starting second grade, then eight, then all a sudden he's eighteen and on too adulthood! I swear it happens that fast. I know cause I'm thirty-five and I remember being six. You all know, time flies by!
I'm a photographer partly out of my love to go back and visit memories by photograph. To be fair, when I was six there definitely was not an over saturation of pictures being taking of anything. These days smart phones and digital cameras have definitely changed that. Orrin also loves looking at photographs, something we enjoy doing together. He just needed a break from being in front of the camera and he voiced it to me. Even though I don't need that picture of him on his first day of school I did want it, for memory sake. I believed it was more important that he went to his big first day of first grade with the right mind set. Though I would have treasured that polaroid forever, I will treasure our conversation we had about how cool first grade would be, how big megalodons actually were, and the possibility where they would be hiding if not actually extinct.
In this case for me, the lack of photograph will tigger the memory of Orrin's first day of first grade.
