Every year the kids have their class picture taken. Like every other kid, I have my own collection of old class photos. I found this one recently among my mother's boxes and boxes of pictures, old report cards and checking statements. It's a picture of my first grade class. The teacher's name was Miss Clink. My dad said she was a kid -- only 21 years old at the time and fresh out of the state college. The next year she was gone -- to marry her sweetheart, settle down in a split level house someplace and start her own little family.Class pictures aren't something you appreciate until many years have gone by. You look back at them and wonder, whatever became of Stanley Lincoln who cried every morning? In the above picture, he's sitting to my left. Does Robin Rubel., in the second row, still have that idiotic grin? In ninth grade when we had to bring in a current event from the newspaper every morning, he brought in the obituaries each day without fail. I wonder if he grew up to become a mortician. And what happened to my good friend, Rhona? She moved at the end of first grade. We hadn't yet acquired the necessary letter writing skills to keep in touch. She's sitting in the first row three seats to my left. Was Terry a little retarded? He never got out of the Blue Birds reading group. Maybe he just had a learning disability. Why did they put me next to two boys for this picture? Was I too chatty? And what about George sitting at the end of the front row there in his bow tie? He liked to catch garter snakes from the woods behind the school and chase the girls around the playground with them. I bet he had a good time in college.
It's fun to look back at these old pictures and remember the people you played with, envied, fought with, competed with on the playground for a turn on the swings or a chance to use that waxed paper you'd saved from your ham sandwich so you could zip down the slide at 100 m.p.h. (so it seemed anyhow). I don't know what became of any of the people in this picture. Except me, of course. Do you know which one is me? My sons figured it out after a while -- mostly because my son, Sean, has my smile. I'm sitting in the front row, third from the left. Missing a few teeth, too.
