Say 'cheese', it's picture day!

By Dan Franch

It was picture day a few weeks ago at our sons’ school here in Luxemburg. Remember those days? Our moms made us comb our hair and scrub behind our ears. They made us wear nice clothes and worst of all, they told us to stay clean… at least before the photos were taken. What a nightmare it was!

There was no such horror story here on the day our boys had to smile for the camera. Sure, we made them brush their fangs and scrub their mugs. After all, we’ve got expectations. But that was it. No need to subject our lads to any further primping. There’ll be plenty of that once they hit their teens.

For now, we let the boys take bedhead to the extreme, even on picture day.

My wife and I weren’t always so relaxed about it, but “we’re cool about it now,” to quote Bryan Ferry. That’s because a few years ago, we completely forgot about the day. But when the pictures came back, the results were pure magic.

Our older son’s head burst from the neck of his wrinkled shirt: smile stretching like an accordion, hair twanging like broken guitar strings, eyes sparkling like fireworks. He was a jack-in the-box set free. And that’s the way we’ve done picture day ever since.

I would like to be like that sometimes, radiate with zestful abandon, bursting into wherever I’m supposed to be with “the devil may care” flair. But the adult world won’t let me. There are rules, albeit unwritten ones, about right and wrong, and we have to know the difference.

The picture day that I had at around the same time as my sons’ reminded me of that.

“Make sure you wash your face, wear clean clothes, and trim your nails,” said Lisa Fuchs, part of the husband/wife team at Fuchs Photography here in the Grand Duchy. Say what?! The last time I heard that was in Grade 6. What a buzz kill!

In the end, though, she was right. One look at my new picture and you’ll see why. My face is washed. My shirt is clean. My nails are trimmed. While I’m no wind-up toy gone haywire, I do look relaxed and like I was having fun. That’s a far cry from how I remember past picture days.

Dan Franch also co-writes our bi-monthly comic strip,Table Manners, about a US family living in Luxembourg.