The Ordinary Moments Are the Ones We Forget

A couple of weeks ago, our younger son got married. Our oldest follows in February.

That's meant spending a lot of time lately going through old photographs. I was pulling pictures for one rehearsal dinner slideshow while setting aside pictures for the next one. If you've ever done this, you know how easily you can lose an entire afternoon. There were birthdays, vacations, and Christmas mornings. School pictures, snapshots with grandparents, goofy shots of the boys together, and plenty of photographs that wouldn't mean much to anyone outside our family.

But I noticed something else. Mixed in with all those snapshots were portraits I'd made of the boys over the years, and many of my favorites weren't made for any particular occasion. They were just ordinary moments I'd decided were worth photographing.

A Seven-Year-Old Swimmer

This portrait of my older son is a perfect example. He was around seven or eight and taking swimming lessons. There was no championship, no birthday, no graduation - nothing that would normally make you think, we need to have a portrait made. He was just swimming. But every once in a while, instead of grabbing a quick snapshot of whatever the boys were doing, I'd take that little piece of their childhood and treat it as if it mattered.

Looking at this one now, I'm glad I did. What strikes me most isn't how young he looks. It's that expression. He looks so serious, and that's him. He was always competitive, and whatever he was doing, he was really doing it - sports, games, hobbies, it didn't matter. If he was going to take swimming lessons at seven, apparently he was going to approach them with the intensity of an Olympic qualifier. All these years later, I can still see that same person in his face.

Portraits Aren't Just About What Someone Looked Like

That's what I keep thinking about as I go through these photographs. We tend to associate professional portraits with milestones: a new baby, First Communion, senior year, graduation, an engagement, a wedding. Those are important, and of course they're worth documenting.

But childhood isn't made up mostly of milestones. It's swimming lessons and missing teeth. Baseball seasons and dance classes. Favorite toys and favorite shirts. It's the hobby they couldn't stop talking about for six months and then suddenly abandoned. It's all those little versions of our children that show up for a while and then quietly disappear. At the time, none of it seems particularly significant. Twenty years later, it can be priceless.

I'll admit making a portrait of my own kids on an ordinary afternoon wasn't hard for me, since it's what I do for a living. But going through these photographs has made me grateful I did it. The snapshots tell me what we did. Portraits like this one remind me who they were.

Maybe the Occasion Doesn't Have to Be Important

Maybe that's the part we get backward. We wait until something important happens, and then we decide it's time for a portrait. But maybe every once in a while, we should make one simply because this particular version of someone we love won't be here forever.

One of my sons is married now. The other will be in February. The boys who existed before any of that are already gone. The one who took swimming lessons like his life depended on it. All the other moments that came and went, one ordinary afternoon at a time. I'm just glad I stopped often enough, on days that didn't seem to call for it, to keep a few portraits of who they used to be.

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