My Favorite Photographer Graduates From PHS - June, 2021

When she was five years old 

my daughter played in our garden

and took pictures.  

She took pictures of her shadow.

She took pictures of an apple tree's first flowers. 

And she took pictures of her cat.   

I posted the pictures on this fledgling blog under the heading Garden Shots on a Sunny Day.  I gave photo credit to "my favorite photographer."    

That was April, 2008.  

Thirteen years have passed.  Matty, the cat, has died.  

The apple tree has grown.     

 

And, my favorite photographer ......... 

Somehow 13 years of a young girl's life got crammed into a mere blink of her father's eye.  The five year old became 18.  The kindergartner; a graduate. 

So, I took a stroll through this blog's early days when sometimes my favorite photographer appeared in these pages.  Here are a few stops I made on my trip down memory lane: 

In November, 2008,  excitement rang through the family as our chickens at long last had produced an actual egg.  I posted Egg! with this picture of her little hands carefully cradling that very first egg.  

My favorite photographer helped me "discover" Earthside Nature Center, which was the subject of several blog posts.  At Earthside we picked wild grapes, crushed them and made juice, uh wine.  The juice was good, but it turned out I was not a great wine maker.

                                       

My favorite photographer and I like the parades.  They were kind of our thing.  On July 4th she put out the flag and, while her mom and brother stayed home, she and I went to the Sierra Madre Parade.  Come to think of it, she and I went to pretty much all the parades.  When she was very young, I put her on my shoulders so she could see.   I don't do that any more.         

As parents we raise up our children. Then we let them go -- not completely of course, but incremental moment by incremental moment.  In the photo above, my wife caught  such a moment at dusk as I watched my favorite photographer scooter down the street, backpack in hand, to her first sleep over.

Fast forward to June 4, 2021.

It is a warm morning in Pasadena and my favorite photographer is on the field at the Rose Bowl. She is there as part of the 2021 graduating class of Pasadena High School.  She is 18; now a high school graduate.  

Graduations are interminable and my mind wanders.  I think back to a morning thirteen years ago when she and I entered this stadium and we stood together on the field.  Back then, she was a beginning soccer player and I was her coach.   Back then, we stood with the a team of green uniformed young girls who named themselves the Lightening Lizards. 

This day, graduation day, June 4, 2021, and my favorite photographer sits on the field with hundreds of  other red gowned graduates.  It is not the start of soccer season.  It is the start of something infinitely more important -- the next phase of their lives.