The deadlines involved with having a high school senior seem to come faster and sooner than I remembered. Senior pictures for FHS, for example, were shot in July.
Then, over the weekend, I found out the deadline for us to purchase a senior congratulatory ad in the yearbook had been extended until today (I didn’t know we had missed a deadline). Granted, I know it takes a long time to put together an annual. Actually, one of the tasks I performed when I worked at Maryville College was to serve as yearbook adviser for The Chilhowean.
Still, I wasn’t prepared for the mid-evening scramble – at the end of a 3-day weekend – to put together our ad. The space you purchase comes with room for some text. Being the creative writers we are, you can see we labored over the final product: “Congratulations Paul, Love Mom, Dad and Holly.”
We worked for days to craft that message.
Anyway, we quickly assembled the package for young Mr. Gary to drop by the first floor office this morning, including check, order sheet, typed sheet with text. We were all ready to go. We just needed the pic.
The key component is the photo, of course. Senior parents from across Farragut will send in legions of baby pix and toddler shots to help illustrate how far their particular senior has come during this journey – from tot to teen (and beyond). Lisa knew exactly which photo she wanted to select for this occasion (just as she did with Holly’s congratulatory ad three years ago).
And generally, we knew where to locate said photo. Of course, that’s when the fun started.
In the bottom compartment of one our bookcases in the front room, we’ve stored a number of photos over the years. Sadly, they are uncharacteristically disorganized for us.
You must understand, all our daily photos are located downstairs in photo albums with dates on the spines and captions to illustrate every birthday, holiday and family vacation. We have digital files to match – both on my computer and somewhere in that place referred to as ‘the cloud.’ And for the pre-digital age, we have photo negatives and slide transparencies stored in a similar organizational fashion.
I have dropped the ball on this one – that is to say, the yearly school and church portraits – however. (Note to self: Here’s a fun project for a cold winter’s day).
As we began to dig last night, I decided we could easily take a few steps toward slightly organizing the cabinet. First, we could recycle a bunch of empty envelopes and miscellaneous sheets of paper we encountered during our dig. Secondly, we could label the myriad photo packs as we dug deeper and deeper for later use.
- Family Portrait, Christmas 2010
- Holly, 6th grade
- Paul, 3rd grade
You get the idea.
Along the way, Lisa encountered a nice, oversized family photo album we had started some years ago (and abruptly stopped, I guess, when things got too busy). We also ran across the photo album my mother did for me as I was growing up (and we noted there was some space in the back that might accommodate some of the family portraits).
We’ll come back to those this winter and hopefully fill many of the empty pages with some of the packs and packs of portraits we uncovered.
It was getting late, however, and we hadn’t found ‘the shot’ yet. We found stacks of sports team photos. We had uncovered niece and nephew pics (from both her family and mine). We had also run across literally hundreds of Holly and Paul pics. Just not the one.
Then, she started looking in a different cabinet and voila, she ran across a non-descript envelope containing myriad pics that had been at her late grandmother’s house. And there, about 2/3 of the way down the stack, she found one tiny 2” x 3” wallet-sized copy of ‘the photo.’ It depicts Paul (age 3) with a perfect pose and an angelic smile.
Just the thing for an occasion such as this!
Talk about finding a needle in a haystack.
Talk about also finding the perfect photograph to illustrate Paul’s senior congratulatory ad (as well as today’s blog entry).
JG
(Source: farraguths.knoxschools.org)
Originally posted 9/4/2012
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