Monthly Archives: May 2022

Baseball and Band

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We have some very significant life events coming up in the next couple weeks for which I’m sure we’ll have a great many photos. In the meantime, we have this album, which presents a collection of pictures from April and May of 2014.

Eight years is a long time. But, looking back from here in the spring of 2022, the distance between then and now feels even greater. Julia and Joe were still in elementary school; William spent most of his time rolling around on the floor; and the world as a whole felt like a safer and saner place than it does today.

The gallery is interesting because it features Joe at about the same place William is today: in the home stretch of the second grade, and finishing up the season at the Farm level in Little League. It’s fascinating to look at these pictures of Joe and compare them to more recent shots of William: even though there’s a clear family resemblance, different aspects of their personalities shine though clearly.

(That said, it’s worth noting that, due to the vagaries of the school district’s academic calendar, Joe is actually close to a year younger in these photos than William is now).

Joe waits for the pitch

William waits for the pitch

Returning to the present, we’re approaching the end of the school year at alarming speed. Julia is effectively done: she finished up her last class this past Friday, and has nothing left but graduation practices. It’s been a difficult and challenging year for her on many fronts, and there are still challenges to come—including major oral surgery in just a couple weeks. Right now, though, she’s looking back with a sense of bittersweet melancholy that is all too familiar to me.

As I write, Joe is on the way home from a band trip to Southern California. The group left by bus Thursday afternoon and on Friday attended a band competition with other bands from around the state. Then, as a reward, they spent Saturday at Disneyland and are returning home today.

Disneyland probably wouldn’t have been Joe’s first choice of places to visit, as he hasn’t historically been that interested in amusement park rides, but it was a bit of a relief that he was able to make this trip: COVID-19 canceled two other school trips that he had been looking forward to over the last couple years.

Julie chaperoned this trip, so I’ve been left alone with Julia and William for the last few days. Miraculously, all of us have survived so far, and William and I even got COVID vaccine boosters on Saturday: my second and his first.

Speaking of COVID, transmission levels in the Bay Area are disturbingly high at the moment, and, in the second half of this month and the first week or two of the next, we’re looking at some the highest-risk activities we’ve faced during the entire pandemic. There’s the band trip, of course, and this past week, after not having heard anything for a couple months, we received a notification from Booksin that at least three people in William’s classroom have tested positive. Last week, Julia had her senior trip to a campground in the redwoods, which also involved a long bus ride. And, coming up, we have the senior awards banquet, which is an indoor dining event; and graduation itself, which is being held indoors with no restrictions on the number of guests each senior is allowed to bring.

All of us have made it through the pandemic thus far without getting sick; if we get past the next couple weeks without anyone catching it, it will be a minor miracle.

Gallery: Baseball and Band

Julia’s Senior Prom

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Here, we have a small selection of photos from a very big night: Julia’s senior prom. It’s a little hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that Julia is old enough to go to a school dance, let alone prom, but here we are. Earlier this week, I posted this photo of Julia looking glamorous in a fancy dress on Facebook and, truth be told, part of me finds it easier to think of her like that rather than as a young woman getting ready to head off to college.

I didn’t attend my senior prom—as I recall, I chose to spend the evening eating microwave pizza and playing computer games instead, since I didn’t have a date—so I didn’t have much to offer with respect to preparing for the big day. Julia and Julie worked through that process over the last couple months, and I did my best to stay out of the way.

Julia first spotted her dress on a trip to the mall with her friends back in March, and she and Julie returned later so she could try it on, along with a few other candidates. Over the next few weeks, they worked through having the dress altered—it just needed a few minor tweaks—picking out shoes, buying a purse, and finding a necklace to go with the ensemble. The day of the prom, Julia spent the afternoon having her nails, hair, and makeup done so she would look her absolute best that evening.

We have some pictures covering various aspects of the run-up to prom, including some professionally shot senior portraits Julia sat for last week, but we’re saving those for another update: this album focuses on the day of the dance itself.

The evening of prom, Julia invited some of her friends over to our place so they could drive over to the dance together. We picked up a few trays of food so that people could nibble a bit as they got ready for the dance, planning for between three and five friends and their parents. Unfortunately, only two girls (and one dad) could make it in the end, so we ended up with a tremendous surfeit of leftovers. Julie was able to give away some of them through the neighborhood Buy Nothing group; two days later, we’re still working on the rest.

Before they left, Julia and Sierra, one of her friends, added a bit of extra elegance to their outfits with vintage mink stoles belonging to Aunt Julie and Grandma Flack, who generously shipped them to California. The girls then headed off to the dance, with Julie serving as chauffeur. They returned, safe and sound, around midnight, having had a great time.

A brief side note from Joe:

(hi this is joe i am adding this to the document please keep this in)

Gallery: Julia’s Senior Prom