A wallet-sized ladder through childhood

Today is the three-month anniversary of Timm's death. These pictures (except for the last) are all wallet-sized photos of Timm which Mom saved over the years; they and the last picture are included in the binder of childhood pix she sent to Timm in the late 1980s. (As I've said before, we found that binder was in the living room of Timm's apartment when we were out in Salem right after his death.)

I can imagine these pictures going into Mom and Dad's wallets along with pint-size pix of the rest of us kids, replaced year after year throughout childhood, showing the slow evolution of a child's features into the eventual adult -- Timm gets chubbier, then taller --: And yet, his hazel-grey eyes have the same look to them, the same gaze which looks out in the adult picture of Timm to the top right of this post.

The last picture in the series is from Timm's graduation from Winter Park High in 1981. In it we see all of that preadolescent fat heaved up into height, the walk confident, hair grown long, showing at its edges the curls of his baby hair ... And the look on Timm's face: delighted to be done with school, to be walking off that stage into the adventures of pre-adulthood. A happy, expectant look ...

These wallet photos ladder to that moment, and are worth celebrating in sequence remembering Timm.

This is my favorite. The smirky grin is quintessenial Timm, goofy, somewhat reluctant, whether from shyness or simply put out for being made to sit still and pose.

Note: in an email after reading this post Mom says that Timm's lopsided smile was the result of him breaking a tooth while playing in the pool of our Winter Haven home; a bucket had shot up in the water and broke the tooth.

Another note from Mom -- she says she was shocked to see how blue Timm's eyes were in 2007 when he came down to Florida to attend his nephew's funeral, "the bluest I can remember. These photos do not show that, but I did ((remember))?