Picture This

Janet Yordon blamed me for ruining her third grade class picture. I wasn't making a face or acting foolish. Okay, I wasn't acting foolish, and I wasn't making a face on purpose. I was wearing an expression of profound dismay. It was probably brought on by the trace of Navajo blood that coursed through my veins. I was deeply concerned that the act of taking my photo would take a portion of my soul, or at least the portion of the portion that would equate with the fraction of my soul that would be equal to the bit of my bloodline that could claim to be Navajo.
Or at least that's the story I like to tell myself forty-plus years after the fact. I think the reality was more like this: I was pouting. I didn't know how to be a good sport when it came to sitting still and allowing everyone to put on their best face. I'm fairly certain that if we could have all gone to our positions on the risers and taken the picture as abruptly as humanly possible, I might have been able to manage a smile. Or at least I could have avoided sticking out my lower lip and letting ever other muscle in my body go slack, giving the appearance, as Ms. Yordon put it, of being "a walrus."
As lasting mementos go, this one goes down as a finger-pointing-who-was-that-guy kind of thing. I was in the front row, and as the rest of the class filed in behind and around me, I could feel my level of disdain rising. How much longer do we have to sit here? I was sitting up straight, looking forward, not at my neighbor. Why couldn't everyone else do the same?
The whole experience could not have lasted more than seven or eight minutes, but for me it felt like an eternity. The kind of an eternity that only a very sensitive third grader with glasses sitting in the front row could possible sense. Or a walrus. Sorry, Janet.