Graduation Pictures

I was stunned last night when Chenille told me that her son's high school graduation pictures were going to cost $500.  The session involves the services of a professional photographer/stylist and three changes of clothing (+ tuxedo).  There will be posed beach shots, studio shots, etc.

Also, the son wants a pricy class ring.  And his letterman jacket, which cost $400 last year, will need to be updated at further expense.

I'm not even in my own high school yearbook.  I didn't like the way I looked, and had no interest in preserving an image of a chrysalis self that I fully expected to shatter when I emerged as a butterfly in college. I must have bought a copy of my yearbook, though, because I remember jettisoning it some years ago.  I didn't even know those people when I was rubbing shoulders with them in the halls of Shawnee Mission South! 

I could hardly wait to put my miserable adolescence behind me and even today I have not an ounce of nostalgia for any aspect of my high school experience.  I've always felt a mixture of contempt and pity for those who recall high school as "the best years" of their lives.

Now of course I have friends who do cherish fond memories of high school and some of whom even maintain ties with former friends and I don't think less of them for doing so.  

And if I had wanted to preserve those memories in the form of a graduation picture, nothing could have been easier.  As I recall, a photographer simply set up camp in the high school gym and students were marched in one by one to have their pictures taken.  Most students made an effort to wear a clean shirt and appear reasonably groomed on that day, but it really wasn't a very big deal.  I didn't know anyone who bothered to buy a class ring, much less a class pin.

What surprises me most about Chenille's son's high school graduation demands is how little things have changed in the past fifty years.  The administration and family still encourage kids to view this period of their unformed lives as something of a pinnacle.  It's pathetic to encourage kids to believe high school graduation is still a remarkable achievement that must be celebrated with expensive and archaic rituals and tokens.  It seems to represent rather low expectations for the future.

Chenille defended the picture taking by pointing out that for many families, this will be the only formal portrait of their son and daughter, and the one that will be displayed on the mantel for the rest of their lives.  She has a point, but it strikes me that nowadays people (especially young people) are awash with images of themselves and their friends.  Often these pictures are digital and perhaps somewhat ephemeral, but most everyone can afford to document his or her lives in a way that would have been inconceivable in my grandparents' day.  It makes me question the need for formal documentation.

Somewhere I have a picture of my paternal grandmother Esther Racus holding a diploma which may represent her high school graduation, but I haven't run across it yet.  The photograph above does show her as a teenager.  The Racus family wasn't wealthy, but they did manage to have several studio photographs taken of their children over the years, and I'm sure these were much treasured since they have been preserved and passed down to a third generation. 

It made sense to spash out on these photographs then, because very few people had cameras in those days; there are no candid shots of my grandparents until they were middle aged.

I'm a bit judgmental about Chenille and Peggy spending thousands of dollars on their son's high school experience because they can't afford to send him to college and I think the money would be better spent on post-secondary education.  But of course I am not the parent of a high school senior who is under the pressure of his peers and a high school graduation industrial complex.  So it's easy for me to conclude the conversation by saying, "I really think you ought to talk him out of a ring."

Linda

I met Linda at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of the seventies.  We were both getting master's degrees in TESOL.  We knew each other through Nancy, and were just acquaintances.  However, when I returned to the U.S. from Italy, Linda helped me get a job at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  She helped me find an apartment too.  We worked and socialized together a lot.  I used to ride my bicycle over to her house pretty regularly. 

Linda was a very nice girl, kind and helpful, fun-loving and humorous.  I didn't get to glimpse her darker, deeper side except in rather veiled references made about an abusive father and negligent mother.  Her later marriage didn't surprise me but the fact it didn't last did.  I suppose what I am saying is I never knew her well.  Of course, I have been so impossibly self-absorbed during most of my own life that it's not surprising I feel I know so few people very well.   

As you can see, Linda had a very straight back; her spine had been partially fused due to scoliosis.  She had wide-set blue gray eyes, and large, perfectly formed white teeth.  She had an odd nose, with a cleft in it.  Her face was expressive, but I suspect she kept a lot of her emotions in check.

After Linda had a baby, she had little interest in keeping in touch with me.  She was consumed with child-rearing and the intensity of emotion that motherhood had aroused.  In conversation she referred to her infatuation with her son, her marital troubles, counseling, issues with her mother.  We reunited briefly ten years ago at a TESOL Conference in Seattle, chatting briefly on the stairs in front of the Convention Center, with little to say to one another and not much warmth or curiosity expressed.

Halis' Military Service

Halis did his military service in Burda.  He wrote several heavily self-censored letters in which he complained that it was so cold he had to line his uniform with newspapers.  He was miserable. 
Part of me was relieved he was in the army.  It meant he wasn't going anywhere without me.  For over a year, we were both in a kind of stasis.

Halis

I took this picture of Halis in 1982 in Kettle Moraine Forest in Wisconsin.  He had come up from Urbana-Champaign, where he was finishing his M.S., to visit me in Milwaukee, where I was teaching at the Intensive English Institute at the university. 

His father had died and he knew he was going back to Turkey for his military service in a few months.  Our relationship was up in the air, but I felt certain that my love for him would triumph in the end.

All my longing for and idealization of him are expressed in this photo.  In the darkroom, I lingered over his emerging image in its acid bath, and printed several copies.

Maybe this picture explains something

This photograph was probably taken Christmas 1985, a couple of months after I had returned from Yemen.  I remember the caftan because I had made it myself.  I was staying at my parents' house in Orchard Mesa, Colorado, and working part time at an abortion clinic in Grand Junction.  I was just treading water, waiting for Halis to get a visa to come to the U.S.

I am holding the dog, Toni.  The dog is looking at my mother, and my father is looking at the dog.  I don't know who my sister, mother and I are smiling at.  I don't remember who took the picture.

I'm not sure why I'm wearing so much make up that morning.  It was the eighties and my eyes were always glammed up.  No bra, but big earrings and plenty of Revlon. 

As in most family photographs, we're not as happy as we look -- at least, I'm not.  It was a rather miserable period in my relationship with my father.  The very sight of me seemed to raise his blood pressure.  I, on the other hand, was 30 years old and gradually becoming my own person and less inclined to kowtow.  This resulted in a few nasty skirmishes.  I knew I should move out of the duplex attached to my parents', where I was living gratis, but I didn't want to commit to a real job or a real apartment because I knew that any week Halis would be coming, and he was going to determine the course of my immediate future.

My father hinted darkly that I was making a mistake, that Halis (and probably no man) would ever marry me.  He even suggested I might reconsider my decision to quit the Middle East.  As it turned out, he was right on the former point.

A couple of months later Halis did receive admittance to the Ph.D. program at Lousiana State, and I flew down to Baton Rouge to join him.  I never saw my father again, as he died of a heart attack the following year.  We had spoken once in the interim year on the phone, when he chastised me for spending too much money on a used Toyota.  He was right about that, too.