(retro)photo Friday #4: Layers. Lots and lots of layers.
This is my first grade photo. I know. The hair.
The level of layering going on here is just…
staggering.
First grade is the first year of my life that I can remember very well. Fortunately I have no recollection of anyone at Bayville Elementary School taunting me unmercifully for the haphazard, home-cut hair. Actually, I was very popular in first and second grades, a point of fact documented at the end of my second grade journal when I wrote, “I was very popular this year and last year too.” Things started going downhill socially in fourth grade, but fifth grade is when I totally lost whatever mojo I had and didn’t get it back until like, oh, I don’t know, my senior year of college.
It’s probably no coincidence that first grade is when I started writing down stories with titles like, “What if All The Vegetables Started to Dance?” in the I LOVE TO WRITE notebook given to me by my teacher. Most of what I can remember from my youth is tied up with what I wrote when I was going through it. I lost the layers. But I still have that first notebook–and dozens of others that followed–because I LOVE TO WRITE became the words I live by.
