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Monday marked the first day of school at St. Mary’s, and strangely, my first time shooting a first day of school. As expected, many of the younger kids cried upon realizing they were leaving their parents’ sides for a life of the daily grind.

I have no witty comment about their tears for fears. Other than this; I, too, cried on a particularly rough first day of school. Sadly, it wasn’t even my own. It was that of my sister, Alexis, in August 1988.

For most of my life to that point (all four years in fact), my sister and I spent every single waking minute together. I even slept in her room every night despite the fact that I had a fold-out sofa bed of my own across the hall. So as you can imagine, our first day apart was stressful.

Wearing a blue dress adorned with white lace fringes, and a particularly nice pair of knee-high white socks (must have been the style, but more likely, poverty), she smiled as she left my mother, my father and I for Mrs. DiMori’s kindergarten class. Much like the young children of St. Mary’s, I came to the realization that she had just become a statistic, another working body in the ever-evolving human race and was leaving my side.

I was crushed.

My mom carried me away from the school — me crying on her shoulder — as my dad snapped photos of my anguish. To this day, the image is a family favorite (they must hate me).

A year later, I joined the statistics and began kindergarten. It was rather uneventful as I was a seasoned vet having witnessed my sister’s ascension into adulthood a year earlier. My attitude reflected that of Ice Cube’s in his song “Ghetto Vet”, “Fool, I’m a vet you can bet that I could dance underwater and not get wet.”

In short, these tears shared by the children of St. Mary’s will last only a moment, but the knowledge and experience they obtain will last somewhat longer.

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