WE ALL HAVE TO GROW UP SOMETIME

Traci contacted me last week to ask if I’d take Quinn’s senior pictures. My immediate response was a mixed bag of being unqualified to take these pictures and internal weeping because how is it possible that this kid is graduating high school?!? I swallowed those feelings and struck a deal with Traci. I would take the pictures for free, edit them and then give them a folder of images to choose and have prints made. She countered the deal with an okay, but we’re going to this fancy ten course dinner place afterwards. We are good at negotiations.

They met me in Tulsa where I had traveled to visit with Mom and we roamed around the Gathering Place while I snapped pictures of Quinn. I took well over three hundred pictures and his eyes were closed in probably two hundred and fifty of them. There was a lot to catch up on since we hadn’t spent time together in almost a year. We swapped life stories while Quinn mugged for the camera. Occasionally, Traci and I would give each other a side eye before making fun of his duck face pose. Yes…duck face is not just for the females and a more experienced portrait photographer would have been able to give this lanky man child better things to do with his face and hands. Even if I was an experienced portrait photographer, I would have been distracted by how it was possible that this human was mostly all grown up.

I have so many stories of this person as a small human. Chris and I were right on the other side of the door to his delivery room and were some of the first people to meet him on his first day on this planet. I have such a clear memory of Traci’s Chris holding this bundled newborn up for us all to witness. Quinn’s head was perfectly rounded and made for those little knitted baby caps. He looked back at us with one squinty eye, like Popeye. Chris was Quinn’s manny from the time he was a tiny baby until we moved to Kansas City. On the Saturday mornings when Chris was working, I’d run errands and then grab breakfast or lunch to take over to Traci’s house. Then Chris and I would watch Quinn poke food into his mouth for over an hour or we’d take him to the Bass Pro Shop to see ‘catfish’. We watched countless hours of Cars and Finding Nemo. We spent every Halloween at their place handing out candy to what felt like thousands of kids or walking the neighborhood trick-or-treating. Tantrums, laughs, snotty noses, I’ve experienced them all.

Traci had made reservations at FarmBar, a place that does a ten course tasting menu, the kind of place I wouldn’t ever think to take a teenager. But Quinn is pretty culinarily adventurous and willing tried each dish that was placed in front of us. There was no need to prod or beg him to just try a bite. The dinner was good, some dishes better than others, but the thing that made this dinner the best was Quinn’s commentary on all of the dishes. If Chris left any kind of imprint on this kid, it was his dry wit and sense of humor. The Kanpachi crudo of shiso ganita and charred onion was described as a “vegetable snow cone” which was not far from the truth. We were five or six courses in before Quinn declared that he hadn’t even used his napkin yet and while waiting on course six, he said “they’re probably back there whipping up one mushroom for the four of us.” And we laughed so dang much.

Quinn has a job and a girlfriend. He’s taking college courses and plans on going to nursing school, like his parents. He’s debating between Japan and Mexico for his senior trip. I told him to pick Japan. He still has that squinty brown eye, though his other eye is hazel. He is taller than all of us. He has Chris’s sense of humor and skill for delivering the perfectly timed, sarcastically dry line.

I bet that skill gets him farther than he can even imagine.