Past, Future and Presents

The deadline for submissions of pictures for the high school yearbook was at hand, and the boy had pushed off deciding.

I didn’t want to pressure him  … again. But this felt like a momentous occasion and I wanted him to take it seriously.

He was keen to make cheeky jokes about his future, binging on beer and games of chess at college as he slouches toward adulthood.

In addition to The Official Portrait SelectionTM … There was also the matter of a message from home, consisting of an uplifting missive about this milestone and a photo from his childhood.

Now, some of the blame was mine, of course. It didn’t help that despite taking a bazillion photos during his formative years, I hadn’t managed to create physical albums for him to thumb through. Instead, I had to comb through The Cloud and find a smattering I could send him through text messaging.

“Just pick something. I don’t care.”

To which I replied with the inclusion of one particularly ADORABLE picture of him (age 6) displaying a copy of The Dangerous Book For Boys with his scrawny, Sharpie-tatted arms akimbo; and wearing a newsboy cap sideways (so it gave the impression of a beret).

“OHMYGODNO!”

How prescient of me, Right?

Two things can be true simultaneously: 1) High School IS NOT the best years of your life, and 2) You may stumble on this dusty yearbook in an old cardboard box some decades from now and thumb through its pages with a minor amount of fondness.

 

Because in the words of everyone’s mother since time immemorial: “You never know.”

This is why when he narrowed the parameters of what he would consider an acceptable image from his formative years: Infant or toddler photos only – no evidence he had ever attended school. And nothing - NOTHING - that could be construed as having any degree of foresight into his temperament. The happy, silly-faced boy who matched the ideal of a happy childhood … was just too embarrassing.

He sat at my side as I fired up the computer, and began scrolling through the old online archives.  

There was Newborn Him, wrapped burrito-like in a blanket … one eye squinting.

And Infant Him propped upright in a basket … the other eye squinting.

Oh, and Six-Month-Old Him reflected in a mirror, his tongue sticking out like a rascal who was going to be (Capital T)rouble. 

“OMGODSOCUTE.”

“Did you ever take photos of me that were just … I don’t know NORMAL?”

I quickly swiped past the one of Toddler Him howling in delight just before dropping a cell phone into the dog’s water bowl.

That’s when I landed on a photo of Toddler Him and His Papa, my father. It harkened to a scene from "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." The two of them snowshoed, trudging along a cross-country ski trail. They had exchanged hats. My dad had the boy’s Nordic earflap hat perched on top of his head, while my son struggled to see through the vintage ski cap that made Anabel Moriarty famous.

We were both silent.  In my mind, the picture could have been a scene out of a Robert Frost Poem: My father with my son, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. 

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

“This is the one,” he said with a catch in his voice. "You can send that one ...

“Unless you find one of us together at the pub with a beer, playing chess.”  

Many happy returns

 “I chose wrong,” said the boy as he strode through a crosswalk, dodging cars and trailing behind. The three of us, now in full jog, were headed toward a wall of sliding glass doors. Truth be told, her brother hadn’t needed much convincing. 

When his sister, freshly back from college, asked if he wanted to join us for some pre-holiday shopping, he smiled slyly and asked, “Whose car are we gonna take?”

“Dad’s. He’s joining us, too”

The menfolk were game even though she had warned them the quest would involve all manner of things that she knew might be irritating; things like darting to various goods stores, sorting through women’s clothes and cosmetics while visiting one particular department store she would insist on pronouncing with a flourish. 

Her brother would chaff at the sound of it. 

We laughed. He laughed. And the doors swung open. In we went — our family. 

I grabbed a handbasket as she perused the first bank of merchandise … an island of misfit toys.

Their father was the most self-protective; he grabbed a double-decker cart, declaring his mission would be to corral all the things we’d managed to forget during three trips to the grocery store over the span of two days and headed toward grocery items.

The boy hung back as if straddling a fence … should he go with us past the “unmentionables”  or should he go with his father toward electronics?

The Ys disappear… only to reappear In phone calls seeking our locations, and then in person a few aisles later. 

“Again, I feel like I have chosen the wrong path,” the boy announces as he tugs at the handle of the basket I am lugging around, indicating by a delicate force the universal language of chivalry.

He will make himself useful by carrying the load.

 “I CAN ALSO show you the forty-six-thousand-inch TV dad would like SOMEONE to fit down the chimney.”

And so we spent the better part of an afternoon chasing each other down aisles looking for hot chocolate and cozy socks. 

Fielding phone-call requests for guidance from the pet food department (yes, Virginia, there is a Kibble Clause, and also there is more than one aisle of dog food brands).

Sending text directions to the store, and more specifically, the parts of the store we had migrated since last he saw us.

And recreating the viral videos we’ve all of the shoppers in search of something fantastic …. Like “a reindeer sculpture that is tiled in disco ball mirrors but rolling on its back” … and finding the very last one in stock.

Of course, we left most of the stores empty-handed. Somehow, the joy we had of being together shopping barely translated to sales. But all was not for naught.

We had broken the ice. Gotten our feet wet in the shallow end. And retreated to a warm car and laughter.

We may not have said YES to the faux-topiary dog sculpture made almost entirely of astroturf, but we managed to cross a few things off of the list. We even found a few reasons to make a happy return.