By which, this time at least, I don't mean: pictures of my family. We have hundreds – thousands – of those, from the decades of my father's passionate taking of photographs; I have several made into plates – including one of all of us some time around 1968 or 1969, where Sandy notably has a beautiful haircut à la Jackie Kennedy (my other sister Lauren has something a bit trendier and more defiant, sort of girl-group-plus-bangs over one eye; my brother looks distinctly Italianate, and I look like the bowl-cut Spock I resembled throughout my teens).
But let's talk about pictures made by my family. Dad, Sandy, and Lauren are the picture makers – my brother is more interested in real objects (especially cars and airplanes), I can't draw, and my mother only ventured into some cautious crafts work fairly late in life. Although Lauren is the professional, Dad and Sandy both had very fine eyes for the 'classic', as shown in Sandy's book (which I'll describe some day).
Just two pictures, then: one, a large Cibachrome photograph by my father from 1976, around the era that he discovered what was then the new dazzling-quality color film. It is a forest of deep-green trees, but seen only in a rippling pond – which gives a strange sense of the mystery and beauty of these trees, as though the forest itself is under water. I told him it was my favorite picture of his, and he made me a print later that year; it has come through thirty-one years – well, not unscathed, as on my last move the frame broke and the glass tore one corner of the print. A local photographer, a very shy but kind man, agreed to try to remount and repair the print; that was two years ago – ridiculously, he and I kept getting busy and forgetting to call each other.
Finally, two weeks ago, he called on a Friday night and said he was in my neighborhood making another delivery, and could bring the photograph – he charged me less than usual because of the delay (and because the delay was at least as much my fault I paid him more than he asked), and stood around, sweet and gentle but nervous as always. (My gaydar says: yes – and he likes me, too – but of course he would never get up the courage to say anything.)
The tear is invisible, the mounting perfect, the light beech frame beautiful: I just hung it in my bedroom (you'll pardon the flash in my photograph, the ones without flash are too blurry; I know that the skills exist to angle the camera so that the glass doesn't reflect, but I'd have to ask Dad...).
The trees in Dad's photograph always suggested my most elemental experience of my parents' house – the room I shared with my brother was on the second floor, and looked straight out into the green leaves of the crowd of very tall trees in our back yard (forty-two trees in the back yard I think, I believe I counted once while mowing the lawn). Most of those trees had about fifteen feet of fairly bare bark before the leaves started, but the height of our windows meant that in spring and summer you looked straight into them – like living in a tree itself.
The second picture is much smaller – and there is a similar one in my office. When Sandy sent me forwarded mail, she would often tack a small post-it on the inside – casually, quickly, evidently while doing several errands at once. These pictures are smiley faces; both of my sisters draw smiley faces, but they don't look like the classic commercial yellow face – Lauren's tend to have the eyes closer together and show a variety of expressions, always comic; but Sandy's inevitably tended towards the wistful, with crinkly mouths and a wry, oh-well-what-ja-gonna-do feeling. Although both kinds of smileys consist of only a line and dots inside a circle, it's amazing how much expression each sister gets into them. And it is notable that Sandy's always looked peculiarly as though their little, round faces didn't merely have an expression – they actually had feelings that they were quietly putting aside, expressions behind the expression....
The smiley is a message. The photograph: wholeness, a gift – a blessing.
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