Page 10 from my senior year memory book

Description: 

A page taken out of my fire-damaged senior year memory book. This page originally was filled with questions about what I thought about my future.  I covered that page completely, covering it with pink notebook paper and then glued a maze of school pictures of myself snaking up and down the page starting with one of me at age 4 and ending up back at the top with one of my senior pictures taken when I was 17 sitting next to my 4 year old self.  I made little black lines between the pictures so you can follow to know exactly what order the pictures are in.  

Stories:

There it is, a one page summary of my childhood.  Each picture I remember for various reasons. 

4 years old: The 4 year old picture is the only one in which I am not smiling.  I’m wearing one of the dresses that would never die.  My mother sewed clothes and like to make us matching dresses. As the youngest that meant that you kept growing into the same dress over and over.  The good news is that by the time I was four, Sarah and I were very close in size so I only had to grow out of that dress twice.  Mom took me to the public school in Westville, IN to have this picture taken.  The only way to get my hair to cooperate was to have it freshly washed, so I took a bath just an hour before the picture was taken.  The pony tail on top was really tight and I remember it kind of hurt.  I remember Mom being very pleased that my ringlets turned out so nice. "you just wind them around your finger and they make nice sausages." I also remember that the light the photographer aimed at me was very bright and he was a total stranger. That is why there was no smile.

Kindergarten:  St. John's Lutheran School LaPort IN. Red happens to be my favorite color (though there was a bit of the 80s when I preferred lavender) but in Kindergarten it was all about red.  This dress was a hand-me-down from someone--outside our family.  By that year my mother had determined that longish hair was too difficult to deal with and always cut it short.  It frustrated me to no end because short hair (if you couldn’t have a Dorothy Hamill style bob was very unfeminine.  My sisters both had long hair and how was I going to become a ballerina if I couldn’t put my hair in a bun.  

1st Grade: By first grade I had given up my ballerina dreams. (The only lessons Mom could find were on Monday evenings and that was Dad's day off so we'd have to give up family time--that's what she told me. They probably also cost more than my folks could afford.) Now I wanted to be a nurse.  I liked the hats they wore.  I don’t know where this dress came from, but I thought it looked like a uniform and thus I wanted to wear it for my school picture.  Rebecca, my eldest sister, did not like the looks of it and begged Mom to have me wear something else on picture day, but Mom told her it was my decision.  I was unaware of that conversation, until I heard my mother discussing it over the phone after we got our pictures back.  The photographer made some comments about the amount of girls in my class wearing sleeveless dresses and how it made them look cold against the wintery backdrop he had brought.

2nd Grade: In second grade I had a store-bought dress that I remember picking out at the store.  My classmate Stacie also owned the same dress and we kept trying to wear them on the same day and kept failing all year to get it coordinated. 

3rd Grade: St. Thomas Public School, St. Thomas ND. The summer between 2nd and 3rd grade, we moved to North Dakota.  For some odd reason school pictures in St Thomas were called pony pictures.  Not even the photographer knew why and once explained we were the only town who called them that.  Rebecca approved of my blouse with the embroidery.  

4th grade: Rebecca came into my room, pulled out of my closet the sweater I have on in the picture, and informed we that we were all wearing sweaters with big collars for our pictures and I should use the pin that a family friend had sent us from Japan.  I had no strong feelings about the outfit one way or another, so I didn’t argue with Rebecca’s choice.  My hair was a bit longer.  Mom let me grow it out, but I didn’t really take care of it. Late in the year Mom offered that if I agreed to get it cut and folks could see my ears she’d let me get my ears pierced.  

5th Grade. Princess Diana’s wedding dress had big puffy sleeves and high neck blouses were a thing.  This white blouse was bought during back-to-school shopping.  It was a nice blouse.  The thing about me is that I was very short-waisted and as a kid kind of chubby.  Then as I matured I sort of grew at the ends. My waistline in the 5th grade was the same as my senior year. I’m not sure if my ears were pierced yet. I wore very small earrings so it’s hard to tell.  All I had for the first year were studs with my birth stone and later little blue stars.  My hair in this picture was the result of a hair cut that my grandmother had given me.  Mom was furious.  Somehow she cut it so all the curls sort of curled into my head.  “You could just shave my head and paint it black” I would complain.  

6th grade. Rebecca was a high school senior and in our small town that meant she worked on the year book, in fact she was a year book editor, and thus was onsite for all the pony pictures as the classes came through.  The sweater was new, but the blouse under it was the same one I had on for my 5th grade picture.  Rebecca was upset that I had not put on any jewelry and she thought my hair looked bad, so she grabbed a comb out of my classmate Margo’s back pocket and combed my hair and then took her necklaces off and put them on me.  I'll admit it, this is one of my better pictures.  After the picture was taken she took the jewelry back.  Big sisters, what can you do?

7th Grade: Over the summer I decided I wanted long hair and started to really grown it out. (the story I tell is that I could finally outrun my mother) For a year I used flexible combs to deal with the bangs until they grew out.  I’m wearing the same blouse for the third year in a row, this time with a purple vest.  After three years, I was rather tired of the blouse and it actually fit Rebecca so she took it.  I had some growing to do vertically but Rebecca who was five years older wore the same size tops I did starting in the 5th grade.  If she wanted something different to wear she would wander into my room and help herself to items in my closet.  I’d protest and she would argue that I wasn’t wearing it. (Mind you, at this point I’d still be in bed.) When I’d suggest that I should be able to wear some of her clothes, she argued that she earned money and contributed to buying her clothes whereas Mom and Dad paid for all of my clothes, so they were family property.  

Eighth grade: I stopped wearing flexible combs.  Most days I did a pony tale but for picture day I pulled my hair back with a single long barrette.  I got a new blouse and I took to wearing a silver chain almost every day.

My freshman year Rebecca sent me a vest and blouse. She had started giving me clothes as gifts.  I generally preferred to have high neck lines, (in part because of my modesty complex and there was a certain classmate who liked to try and shoot paper wads down girls shirts, and I didn’t have any interest in giving him a target). But it was a nice combo and I figured Rebecca would be happy to see it, so I wore it on picture day.

Sophomore year I was back to embracing red as my favorite color.  In the late 80s bold colors had pushed out the pastel trends of the early decade. Mom was using her knitting machine again and she made me the sweater.  There are wide bands of different knit patterns but it is all made of the same red yarn.  It had wide sleeves.  Much to Rebecca’s dismay I paired it with a blouse that didn’t match.  If you look really close you can see that the strips on the blouse are bright pink.  

Between my sophomore and junior years we vacationed in Winnipeg and did a week of Folklarama.  At the Hungarian pavilion mom bought me a hand stitched blouse done with traditional Hungarian style embroidery.  A more traditional form would have the flowers in bright reds, pinks, and blues, with green leaves. Those were available, but I asked for the white-on-white figuring it would be easier to pair with things. I wore it for my picture that year.  By then I was very happy with how my hair looked and it seemed with the length, to curl even more than when it was shorter.   Almost every girl in my high school had permed hair and tall hair-sprayed bangs, aka mall hair.  The highest compliment someone could give my curls was to say it looked like my hair was permed.  I liked how I looked as a teen.  I was blessed with mostly clear skin and I finally had the long hair I could put in a bun or a braid or a pony tale.  

The last picture was my senior picture.  There were several to choose from but for my official portrait I like the contrast of the black sweater and pearls. It seemed timeless to me.  I believed that in 20 or 30 years I wouldn’t look and have to explain, “that was the fashion at the time.”  I remember laying out all the proofs, trying to select which one to have prints of.  I gave them names as I considered them.  This one I dubbed “I’m pretty and smart too.”  

One final story about this page.  When I was a freshman in college I was assigned a roommate from Japan, Shoko Honda.  I was sharing my senior book with her and when she got to this page she pointed to my 2nd grade picture and exclaimed “You were FAT!" Then pointing at the next five pictures in turn said “Fat, fat, fat, fat, fat,”  Um...yeah.   I could have been offended, but I chalked it up to cultural differences, and was happy that at least she had put it in the past tense.