Old Photos

(I don't know how to post photos here so I hope you can follow along.)

This past weekend I was looking through some of my old photographs. There was my baby picture that my grandfather had managed to mount and frame inside an old cough syrup bottle. I'm still not sure how he managed that unless he was really good at cutting and glueing glass. They hadn't invented Super Glue back then.

There were the annual school photos, including the obligatory cute pose with me resting my chin in my palms and trying to force a smile. There was a picture of me in my tux standing in front of my first car on the day of my senior prom. I went stag. Another picture showed me with this girl from church. She had a beehive hairdoo. Everyone in church weas trying to hook us up because she was a 'good Christian girl', but I was more interested in her bad sister. The beehive girl became a hair stylist, the bad sister dropped out of school - I don't remember either of their names. My senior picture was the worst photo ever taken of me, where I had this awful haircut intended to imitate the Beatles - except mine was too thin and limp and cropped too high. Looked more like a bowl cut.

In a lot of these photos I was smiling and seemed to be enjoying myself. Those must have been happy times, growing up with no cares except my shyness when it came to girls. The thing is - I don't remember having those pictures taken. I mean, aren't photos supposed to remind us of something?

What I couldn't find are pictures of things I actually remember; like the expression on my face when I found out Santa Claus wasn't real and that my parents had been lying to me about Santa and the Easter Bunny, and Bloody Bones (a monster that came after naughty children). There was no picture from the day my dog, Buster, was hit by a car. There was no picture of my embarrassment when my parents dropped my younger brother and I off at my older brothers home and they had to cancel their plans to take in a movie. I didn't expect my brother to pay our way, even though kids could get a ticket, box of popcorn and a small Coke for twenty-five cents back then. I felt guilty for years about ruining their plans.

I wish I had a picture of the time my mother admonished me for asking for some toy they couldn't afford to buy me. She told me that my dad worked hard to provide for a roof over our heads and the food we ate; and that he could have bought the cheap, one-ply scratchy toilet paper rather than the two-ply soft kind, so we should learn to be thankful for what we did have. That was the day that a light-bulb went off and I realized that it wasn't all Happy Days and that adults didn't have fun because they were always worried about how they were going to take care of their kids.

There was no picture of me sneaking into the living room when I was seven to check on my grandfather where he lay in his coffin. It was spooky having a dead guy in the room next to mine. Papa was 92, and he died while working in the garden. Neither was there a picture of a bunch of us kids freaking out the evening of his funeral when we thought we saw an image of a skull in the lampshade in Papa's bedroom.

I wish I had a picture of that lion I saw in the sky one afternoon while shelling butterbeans on the back porch with my mother and Papa. Actually it was just the face of a lion, like that one on the MGM logo. I would have shrugged it off as the imaginations of a bored child with sore fingers, but my mother would years later confirm that we really saw a lion - in living color - in the sky that afternoon. She said it was Jesus. I think it was Asland.

I'd like to have had a super telephoto lens and have captured the UFO that a group of us soldiers saw high in the sky over Fort Bragg one night. The UFO was flanked by two aircraft. They had the typical red and green colored lights on each wing but the UFO was bright white. It played with the aircraft for awhile, then it sped away at almost warp speed. You could see the two aircraft try to catch up to the UFO but there was no contest. The government disavowed any knowledge of a UFO or military flights above Fort Bragg that night but about 40 of us know what we saw.

Although I don't have pictures of any of my children being born, I was there when they were. It's probably for the better; other people probably wouldn't be too impressed by the slimy, red-flushed babies with mouths opened in their first of many screams; and my wives wouldn't be too keen on people seeing them in such vulnerable and awkward positions.

I have pictures of my wedding days in a box somewhere, but I seldom take those out to look at. What I don't have are the photos where we argued and said things that led to the point where we realized our marriage was over. In retrospect, I don't want to relive those memories. I wish I had did pictures of the moments we fell in love. If I had those perhaps I wouldn't have memories of the divorces.

Still, why do we have pictures of things we can't remember; or where we have to describe what's going on to people who wondered why we wasted film on that picture? We ought to have the presence of mind to take photos of the life-changing moments that shaped our history and our legacy. Forgotten and forced smiles are a sad substitution for our moments of victory, or our shame, our guilt, our love or our moments of growth.