Free Bryson City Secrets: Even More Tales of a Small-Town Doctor in the Smoky Mountains by MD Walt Larimore

class photo. There were fourteen of us in that photo — ten boys and four girls. And the most unhappy girl in that photo was the pigtailed little blond, who had been instructed to sit by me. She scowled for that picture; I smiled. Payback time was sweet for five-year-olds!
    That little girl and I grew up not too far from each other. We went to junior high school, high school, and college together. We eventually became best friends. And in 1973 we were married.
    I still say “OK” when she tells me to move it.

    Now here we were, husband and wife for eleven years, preparing our oldest for her first day of school. The shopping for school supplies had been dutifully completed at a local variety store. Both sets of grandparents and several uncles and aunts had called to extend to Kate their best wishes with regard to this auspicious occasion.
    And, bless their hearts, Pastor Ken Hicks and his wife, Tina, dropped by for a visit the evening before, and they said a special prayer of blessing for Kate as they “commissioned” her to “go into the world.”
    Even Scott chipped in by making sure everyone was up an hour before the alarm was set to go off so that we’d have plenty of time for, as he put it, “our last breakfast together before Kate went off to school.” He also volunteered to wear Kate’s new school backpack for her as we left the house — with KATE L. printed in red marker on white tape across the back. “Katel.” I remember thinking. “It has a nice ring to it” — and it would soon become one of Kate’s nicknames.
    As Barb held Kate’s and Scott’s hands, our family walked to the end of the driveway. The children talked and laughed, and I found myself smiling and watching — knowing that this was a moment worthy of a mental picture.
    My grandfather Larimore had taught me the incredible value of what he called “mental photographs.” He told me about how he and my grandmother, too poor to be able to afford a camera early in their marriage, simply agreed, whenever they were experiencing a “Kodak moment,” to give each other a little nonverbal signal and then focus on the object of their attention or observation — “snapping” a mental photo they would keep for life.
    Barb and I had taken a series of mental Kodachromes at our wedding, and we’ve been pleasantly surprised to learn how vivid these cerebral snapshots have remained through the years. But the most pleasant surprise was the experience of the sensations, thoughts, smells, and feelings that had accompanied that exact moment of each picture and how each was preserved in our mind, along with the mental picture.
    On each of our wedding anniversaries, we would replay each of those pictures and laugh at the goose bumps that we each experienced again.
    At Kate’s birth, one of my fellow interns who had come into the delivery room to photograph the grand event forgot to remove the lens cap of the camera. When the film was taken to be developed, we had no pictures at all — nothing but black negatives. Had it not been for our mental pictures, our record of Kate’s delivery would have many, many holes in it.
    So it should come as no surprise that as we stood at the end of the driveway, my thoughts turned to taking some family pictures with our minds, as Barb devotedly took a series of standard 35mm pictures. I was so grateful to be there and so thankful to have, even today, pictures of my oldest child — the kinds of pictures that my dad didn’t have of me.
    Then the yellow bus pulled up. As it stopped, Kate leaped toward the door as it opened.
    â€œTurn around, Katherine Lee!” Barb commanded, as I reheard in my mind’s ear what my mom had said twenty-six years earlier. “Now smile!” both moms exclaimed — my mom in a dusty old memory and Kate’s mom in a memory being formed at that moment.
    Kate tried, as I