I have no idea when this photo was taken, so I’m just guessing it was my third birthday because I look to be about three years old. I’m the one in the “32” shirt. The boy with the teddy bear is Luke Akroyd. I called him “Lukey”.
The actual photo is about three inches by three inches, from the days when photographs were square. The corners are rounded and it’s faded to almost a sepia. I found it in mom’s day planner after she died. She kept this photo near her for almost forty years. I grew up and went to high school and college and moved far away from home and she had hundreds — if not thousands — of photos of me. But this is the one that she saw every day, probably multiple times every day, every time she looked in her day planner.
I have my own three year old now. Maybe that’s why this is such a powerful image for me. Not the photo of myself, but the thought of mom, in her forties, and her fifties, and her sixties, looking at this photo of her son when he was a toddler. She loved me so much.