Can You Hear Me Now

Looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer
I was taken by a photograph of you
There were one or two I know that you
Would have liked a little more
But they didn’t show your spirit quite as true
You were turning around to see who was behind you
And I took your childish laughter by surprise
And at the moment that my camera happened to find you
There was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes

Jackson Browne

I was around 13 or 14 when I bought my first camera. My memory is a bit foggy, but I believe it was a used Kodak Instamatic 104 and I probably picked it up at a thrift store. Because money was scarce at that age, I mostly shot in black and white. Color was a luxury well beyond the fifty cents an hour I made cutting grass and washing cars.

I was able to save a small pile of those early photographs and recently found them stashed away in an old cigar box. Who knows where the rest of them ended up? Unfortunately, most of the prints that survived are not all that interesting. I spent too much time taking photos of things and not enough film on people.

Here are some less-than-stellar shots.

Of the rare people photos, here are two that survived the years. Both are of my friend, Steve.

Sadly, the photos I would most like to see were never taken — my deceased brothers, my demolished elementary and high schools, the Old Scottsdale stores that went out of business years ago, and my other friends. I owe that to a combination of shyness (it takes bravery to ask people to pose for the camera) and my desire to be more artistic. Clearly, neither one worked out all that well for me.

Fun fact: Many years ago, my mom went through all the family photos and built albums for each of her six children. Each one focused on the recipient. Like many families, the oldest children had far more photographs than the youngest. Since I was in the former, there were lots of photos of me and not so many of my youngest sister and brother.

I brought the album to work one day and after viewing the first few pages, one of my younger coworkers started crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said, “I have no black and white photos of me.” As strange as that response might seem, I got it. Black and white photos are special and she felt left out of that specialness.

I can only imagine what today’s kids will feel like years from now when all their digital photographs were lost to non-backed-up mobile phones.

That Was Then

That’s enough preamble. The reason I sat down to write my latest blog entry is this. Linda and I both love having framed photographs of our family around the house and we have run out of places to put them. So, rather than constantly rearranging and putting some out to pasture, I joined the modern world and bought a digital picture frame.

While it would be so easy to fill the frame with recent iPhone photos (rarely is the day when my grandchildren aren’t photographed), I chose to do a lot of looking back. Intermixed with my granddaughter’s recent 12th birthday party are photos of my kid’s 12th birthdays, vacations long past, the first photo I received of Linda, and quite a few of those black and white photographs from Mom’s Andrew album. Heck, I even added the two ancient photos of my friend Steve to the rotation. And no, I am not paying him a model fee.

Spend some time in front of my ever-changing frame and you will develop a pretty good understanding of my life today and the paths I took to get here.

Being the nostalgic guy that I am, I am drawn to sit by the frame several times throughout the day. I smile at my grandchildren’s perpetual changes, laugh when the goofy faces come up, and spend 15 seconds reliving the cycle of grief as my brother Bob and mother scroll by.

Clouds
billowed and ripe with rain
a mountain road
twisting and turning this way and that
a field of tall summer grasses
or the silk from a thousand ears of corn
waving in the August breeze
strong and sturdy this one
smooth and slender she be

This picture imagined
or this picture real
the tactile glow of all this and more

Mostly, though, I feel joy for the life I have been privileged to have. Sure, there were quite a few gut wrenching hard times, but there was also so much love and glorious transformation. While I don’t want to give too much importance to a digital device, its presence in our house has become a reminder of what I want from life. It’s my legacy (so far) in scrolling motion and I am blessed to be alive to witness it.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. Susan Sontag

Epilogue

While I am thankful for my many printed photographs, they take up a lot of space. I did a quick search and we have at least 20 albums scattered around the house and countless more prints can be found in bags, boxes, and drawers. My hope is that they will find good homes after Linda and I are gone, but I expect that many will wind up in the trash. Nobody wants their parents’ junk.

Thank you for reading.

That face in the photograph
faded, cracked, and torn
a black and white face
suspended in time
pure and simple

How could that child be me?

For I gaze into the mirror
hoping to catch a glimpse of him
free from the scars we adults carry
like badges of honor
tattoos of shame

I look deep into the glass
seeing little more than a world-weary me
lost and confused
drained
searching for the answers
to questions still unknown
searching for that face
that untainted face