My favorite photo of my father is really just about me.
Selfish I know, but what are memories if not a tidy excuse to see the world through our own eyes?
It is a simple black and white photo taken with one of those old flash cameras you see in flea markets now. The light within it is faded as though the picture was taken in a mist. He is not wearing a shirt and his thick waist fits firmly into the fluted rim of his trousers. He is facing sideways to the camera and there is a look of pride in his profile. He is holding me up and out, the way one would examine the label of a fine champagne. I cannot be more than a few months old there, held by him, his hand under my head, all held and looked at.
All held.
His first wife told him that they could not have children and he thought it was his fault, so I have heard. Then he married my mother and at the age of 47 became a father. My father. Everyone said he was so proud. Who knows what they meant exactly? Proud of me or of his sudden ability to have me? I do not know, but you can see something like it in that picture. I look at it every so often. It was the last time pride was showered on me like a celebration for no better reason than that I was there.
The photo is fading as photos do and so it also makes me think about the day he died.
I had gotten up as usual, watched him put on his glasses, boxer shorts, socks, and all the rest, then I went to get ready for school. But I was drawn back to the bedroom by some sort of commotion. I stood in the doorway and saw him kneeling on the floor near the bed. He was holding his stomach, groaning. Later on he seemed to feel better and I was sent off to school. But in the afternoon, my aunt Ethel met me and took me home with her. I slept with my cousins that night and knew that something was wrong but I somehow could not conceive of what it might be.
When they brought me back home the next day, the house was filled with visitors. Shadows packed all the spaces. The TV was off and the lights were dim. The colors drained. My uncle from Chicago was there. Other figures walked delicately through the rooms. Then my mother, her face red and swollen, took me to my room and held me. Her arms were hot, her shoulders quaking. Her throat seemed raw as her voice receded into a distant tremor struggling through a flat soundscape. She told me then that he had died. I could see that she was fighting to be strong for me and losing the fight. I let her squeeze me and slipped into her anguish like a good boy. But I was ten years old and I did not know what it meant. Not really then.
For years after he died, I had dreams that the doorbell would ring and that he would be there, coming home from work as if nothing at all had happened. He would take off his coat and hang it up neatly in the hall closet, then put his gray fedora on the shelf. Then he would hang his jacket on the hook on the door, wink at me and go into the kitchen to see my mother. That wink was a secret code. It meant I could search his pockets and find the candy bar he had hidden for me.
And the decades and life flew by and I am older now than he ever was and I cannot look at that picture of him holding me without thinking of all of that...of death, of life, of things that are vivid and those that fade.
I cannot look at it without thinking of myself. Cannot look without thinking. Without waiting for these memories to fade and knowing full well that they refuse to do it and never will.
No comments:
Post a Comment