9/25/20 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: Mrs. Magee and our Fourth Graders Working Hard in the CafeClassroom!

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family:

The taking of a photograph is so easy these days. I would venture to guess that every one of us has a camera that we carry with us at all times. With the click of a button on our phones we can not only snap a picture but we can send it around the world via any one of a dozen social media platforms.

When the pandemic was new and I was trying to figure out how to do morning prayer during lockdown I handed my phone to my step-son, Stephen and asked him if I could do video on it. He looked at me like all young people look at old people who are hopelessly behind the times, pushed two buttons and said, “you are recording now.”

I am to be excused for my ignorance. I grew up in a time where the taking of photos was easier than in previous generations but still involved multiple steps. We had our instamatic camera with its revolutionary cartridge of film and its 4 cube flashbulb. You could take 12 whole pictures, 4 inside using the flash, before popping out the cartridge. Then you would make a trek down to the Fotomat, a small glass enclosed cubicle that sat in the mall parking lot. After a day or two wait you would receive your 12 photos in a white paper envelope and hope that they turned out.

Poloroid cameras did give you instant pictures; ell not exactly instant. They developed in a minute. In the original version you had to actually count before you pulled off the backing of the print. If you did it too soon or waited too long the picture was destroyed. Later, you could watch with fascination as a fog cleared before your eyes into the image you had shot the moment before. But poloroids were not the quality of “real” film and you couldn’t make reprints or enlargements. Of course even with film you had to keep the negatives to do that. Most people don’t even know what a negative is any more.

I bring all of this up  as I reflect on our annual picture day which happened on Wednesday. Despite the fact that we can and do take pictures on a daily basis of just about anything we want, despite the fact that we can not only instantly see the picture, but edit it and crop it and put weird filters and imoges on it, and despite the fact that we can send those photos to all our friends and family within two minutes of it being taken, we continue to have our students sit before a camera for picture day and wait a month or so to see how they turned out.

Picture day is an annual ritual for us. It is a way to mark the passage of time from one year to the next, from one grade to the higher grade. Look how much she has grown since last year’s picture, we will say. As our children move from Kindergarten up to eighth grade we have a visual record of them from being practically babies to young adults. As for our own school pictures, if our parents saved them for us we can look back and cringe a little. I hated my braces, we might say, or how did my mother let me leave the house with that hairstyle?

I was in the gym for the whole of picture taking on Wednesday, obstensibly to keep things organized and the lines moving. My real motive, it must be confessed however, was that I delighted in watching each of our students sit or stand before the camera and take their masks off. In what promises to be a long year of hiding them, it was so nice to see our students, your sons and daughters beam those bright smiles for posterity. It made me hopeful that one day you as parents can simply say “ I love you” to your children as they leave the car instead of, “Do you have your mask?”

Your children looked delightful on Wednesday and the love that you have for them showed in the outfits they wore or how you did their hair that day. We are blessed to be teaching children of parents who care about them as you do. Unfortunately, there are children out there who don’t have that. We need to keep those children in our prayers.

As for someone who works in a school and has to have his picture taken every year the whole passage of time is gotten to be a little ridiculous. More gray hair, more wrinkles. I don’t have one of those picture frames marking the passage of time. Time has passed me enough already!

Jim Silcott