I don’t have a senior picture.
If you walk through the halls of my old high school in Denver, Colorado, it has one of those flip displays with senior pictures from various classes going back decades.
Get to 1985 and find my name and the oval where the picture would be is blank.
That memory was sparked this week as people in my Facebook and Twitter timelines were posting their old senior pictures. It is one of those ubiquitous new time-sucking social media trends amid the coronavirus pandemic that started, I think, for the best of reasons. To show solidarity with the Class of 2020, somebody came up with the idea of posting their old high school photos.
This year’s senior class is getting robbed.
No prom. No state championships. No class trips or senior skip days.
People are also reading…
Every day is senior skip day.
My senior year was full of memories, some of them not so good. My family had moved back to Littleton, Colorado, after a year in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I attended my junior year of high school. It was a good year, with new friends and challenging experiences, followed by my parents’ divorce and a move back to an old school where everything was different.
It’s amazing how much changes in a year. I came back to a school where my old friends had moved on and I made new ones. I don’t remember if senior pictures were taken that summer, or I just forgot to sign up for them, but it didn’t seem that important. Before prom, I was worried about a cowlick in my hair and I took my mom’s shears to it. They were the ones she used to use to give me a bowl cut in elementary school that made me look like Dorothy Hamill. I cut too much. I tried to balance it out and cut too much again. I ended up with about an inch of shaved head atop my forehead, a self-imposed receding hairline a week before prom.
My date acted like it was no big deal. She broke up with me before we both headed away to college.
I made a mixtape to help me get over my disappointment. I’m pretty sure Phil Collins’ “One More Night†was the lead track.
You remember mixtapes? Those cassettes we would put into our boom boxes and record our favorite songs when they played on the radio?
When my dad bought cars back then, he would never pay for more than an AM radio. So, I always had my boombox sitting on the front seat of the family station wagon whenever I was driving, at least until I got my first car, a 1979 Ford Pinto with an orange plaid interior.
The mixtape reminds me: That would make for a good Facebook or Twitter thing: What are the top three songs you would put on your mixtape? But I digress.
These days, kids don’t have mixtapes, they just carry their music with them on their phones. And they don’t have boomboxes, but portable Bluetooth speakers.
The other day, as we continued our oasis through stay-at-home-ness, my wife and kids and I were outside playing volleyball. My son blasted rap music from his phone, through his boombox, er, Bluetooth speaker, and my teens danced, in front of their parents, on purpose.
It was a moment that, I think, would not have happened if not for the pandemic.
If school had not been canceled, we would have spent the spring going to freshman volleyball games, watching my daughter perform in the middle school play, where she had her first big part, and watching my son’s friend play high school baseball. From game to game we would have gone, passing each other as one parent and one kid headed to a fast-food dinner after practice and the other headed to a game across town.
It would have been great, a continuation of the life we’ve chosen for ourselves. But there would have been no dancing in the backyard to today’s version of yesterday’s mixtape. There would be no family meals, or fewer of them, where we sit together at the kitchen table eating food we made at home.
There would be no family poker night, or family movie night, or family walks where the two teenagers talk to each other, at least a little bit.
I’m sure my kids are missing their spring sport and activity seasons. They’re missing their friends. It’s heartbreaking, and yet, it is opening new opportunity.
My wife was rummaging through the basement the other day and found her senior pictures. There are several poses, all held together in a nice trifold leather folder that had been buried in a forgotten pile of mementos . She was, as we said back in the day, a fox.
Twenty years from now, maybe more, one of my children will be in their basement, going through boxes. They’ll find a photo of them dancing in the backyard on a school day.
Perhaps they’ll smile at a memory made in an otherwise tragic time of loss.