Future Faces

He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

—Mark 10:14

There’s a photo of me on the wall in my parents’ house, one of my senior pictures. I picked two I liked, and my mom picked one I thought was weird—my expression was veiled, like I knew a secret, and I didn’t look like myself, I didn’t think. I liked the ones that were broad smiles, straightforward, happy-looking. But my mom insisted on this other one because she said she had a sense, when she looked at it, of the woman I’d become in the future. She was right. That photo looks strangely like me now, twice the age as when it was taken, and the ones I liked are time capsules of a moment that came and passed.

I see flashes of Henry’s future face all the time in him, partially because he looks so much like me and like my dad. And because he’s on the tightrope walk of little boy and big boy. Yesterday at his kindergarten screening I saw both of them—the little boy and the big—in alternating moments. He was shy and proud; he was uncertain and full of swagger. He was little and he was big, right in the same day, in the same moments.