Send us your favorite school picture

For those of us on Facebook and Instagram, our feeds have been deluged lately with images of children wearing backpacks and posing in front of their homes, with friends at the bus stop, on their beds in college dorm rooms, and beside moms who are doing everything they can to hold back tears and muster a smile for a sacred tradition.

Here’s your Beacon Communications Team: Maggie Scroope, Laura Bailey and the author share their back-to-school photos.

The back-to-school picture.

Get ready to start looking through scrapbooks for your favorite. Of YOU. We’ll get back to that…

Most kids dread the back-to-school photo. But they are taken year-after-year-after-year. There’s really no way to get out of them, no matter how much you resist or how late you’re running that first day of school. Everyone knows the drill. You hold up the number of fingers for the grade you’re in, or you hold a sign or chalkboard that says the grade. You smile for Mom. One, two —

You get the picture (bad pun intended).

There’s also a close runner-up to the back-to-school picture. It’s the much dreaded school picture.

Remember when you were little and your parents picked out something special for you to wear. They set it aside so it couldn’t get wrinkled, stained or torn ahead of time. The morning of pictures, Mom would get it out of your closet and lay it out on your bed for the big day.

At school, your class would be called down to the gym or cafeteria, where you’d stand in line and laugh as your friends took turns in the hot seat. Until it was your turn. Knowing all eyes were on you, you’d suddenly start to sweat. You’d fix your hair, straighten your collar, look at the camera and take a picture that your parents would carry around in their wallet until the next picture day.

Now that we’ve set the scene, we want you to dig through your old photos and email us a back-to-school picture of YOU at TheBeam@beaconhealthsystem.org. It’s up to you if you want to share the year it was taken, or the grade you were in.

Choose your favorite picture from the first day of school or school picture day and we’ll share them in a special photo gallery right here on The Beam. Please include your name, location and department.

Encourage your colleagues to send us their photos. Thanks for taking this walk with us through memory lane!