This was my yearbook photo.
Both older brothers had professional photographers, but me, they had to drag out of detention, days before the final proofs had to be at the printer, lined me up against the hallway wall and took this mug shot.
I love this portrait...
Most yearbook photos don't really represent the person in them, I've found. It seems that the majority of the time, the lighting is too perfect, the clothes too un wrinkled, and the smiles, overly rehearsed. One of the first of many shows that would be put on for our upcoming adulthood...
That's how I looked at it, back then. Maybe it was envy , maybe outright jealousy, I'm not quite sure....
All I do know is that there was absolutely no need for me to take SAT's or prepare transcripts, no admissions office to impress. I graduated in the bottom 95th percent of my class.
Since then, I've fallen in and out of love, a couple dozen times. Had a whole lot of different jobs and hung out with a lot of different people....
Lots of mistakes, quite a few outright failures, and surprisingly, some success...
Of course, none of those " successes" were choreographed by me.
I wonder what the guy in the picture would have said if you told him that his greatest happiness would be found, many decades later, in the exact same village he had grown up in, in the house of his youth?
If you told him that he would marry the woman of his dreams who would be his one true love, and would be surrounded by three amazing kids he called his McMonkeys...That he would grow to cherish and respect the parents he'd grown up resenting and wishing away?
That some of his greatest fears would become their aging and fragility, and the joys he would have as he would watch them, watch his children grow?
I wouldn't have believed you..
Who would have?
Did any of us end up exactly where we planned?
This picture?
It's as faked and posed and choreographed as all the rest...
Most put their best face on, back then, in hopes of a greater future...
Me?
I just kept up the show...
Thankfully, gratefully, life has a way of bringing almost all of us back around...
God has a way of bringing us back around...
I don't know if values change or they just begin to emerge and clarify.
I do know that for a very long time, I have not been this guy.
I can't do one arm push-ups anymore.
I have sufficiently misspent my youth.
That is O.K.
That's what it's for. God graces us with it so we can hopefully develop wisdom. I may not be a wise man yet, but I have learned to listen to a few of them...
Guess that's something...
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