A paper silhouette, December 1992

I have been digging through some of my old things lately, and I want to start putting a few of them here, the small artifacts that say something about who I was as a kid. This one reaches back the furthest of anything I still own.

It is a profile silhouette, the kind they make in preschool by tracing the shadow of your head onto paper and filling it in black. The bottom corner is labeled in an adult’s careful handwriting: “Todd, 12-92.” I was born in March 1988, which means that in December 1992 I was four years old, a few months shy of five. Preschool, in other words.

I do not remember the day this was made, but I remember the room, and, a little, the teacher. I believe she was a Ms. Zehl. She was already an older woman when I knew her, kind and patient in the way that the very best preschool teachers are. She must have been in her sixties or seventies even then, so she would be remarkably old by now, if she is still around at all. I do not have a single picture of her, which makes me a little sad. If I ever turn one up, I will add it right here. Wherever she ended up, I hope she knew that the small kindnesses she handed out to a room full of four-year-olds stuck with at least one of them.

There is not much more to it than that. A black paper head, a date, and quiet proof that I was, once, very small.