Photographs and Memories

Click! Click! Click! Glancing up from my book, I look directly into the cyclops eye of my husband's newest lens protruding from the center of his face. He crouches on the floor at the foot of our bed like a nature photographer stealthy capturing images of an unknowing animal in its habitat. It is ten thirty at night and I am in my wrinkly PJs scrunched down between pillows, reading by the bedside table lamp light. Crab-walking, he moves to a new angle, never once lowering his lens. I hold my book over my face blocking his shot. Click!Click!Click! The rapid succession of his professional, high resolution camera makes its digital images inches from my face.

“Paul! I'm trying to relax. Don't take pictures of me right now.” We have had this discussion many times before. He lowers his camera enough to peak out above it. He doesn't speak for a minute, hoping I will forget he is there if he is quiet and still enough. But I'm not a lion or a zebra in a clearing. I know he is still there, waiting.

“You'll be sorry when you don't have pictures of your normal, day to day life.” He lifts his camera again and takes close-ups as I glower. “Besides, what did you expect, marrying a photographer?”

I didn't just marry a photographer like Ansel Adams or Ann Geddes or Annie Leibovitz, who focus on drawing out the beauty, majesty, and downright adorableness of their subjects; I had to go a marry a photojournalist. Someone who loves to capture the reality of moments, of human interactions, of life, and who thinks the best moments are when the subject forgets there is a camera present. A photographer who believes even the smallest of photoshop touch-ups are an affront to his work, a gross simplification and cover-up of the truth in the work. Unfortunately, the reality for me at this moment is an exhausted, makeup-free face revealing a few unsightly red zits, the remnants of mascara smudged unevenly beneath both eyes, hair still damp on my forehead and sticking up in different directions, and that downward gaze of intense concentration I never see in the mirror. The gaze that somehow makes the promise of old lady jowls (genetic inheritance from my dad's mother) appear in the etched lines above my frown.

Is he right? Will I be grateful to have these unflattering, candid photos sprinkled in with the planned ones, where I at least have a fighting chance to look beautiful with make-up and day clothes? I mentally review the jumble of childhood photographs stored in the linen closet at my parent's. It has housed so many albums and boxes over the years that the shelves collapsed. Those wood panels are now mixed in with the framed photos and plastic storage tubs of snapshots. Anyone who wants to look at the photos, must stand back when opening the cupboard to avoid the avalanche of memories sure to come cascading out onto the floor. Despite this hazard, I regularly dig through this mine of images searching for treasures.

I love to see my nine-year-old, missing-teeth grin hovering proudly above the Jello poke cake decorated with berries to look like the American flag for the neighborhood fourth of July block party. There are four pictures of me with different blanket bundles of baby brothers. There is my tween self with two-inch dark blue nails, humongous hoop earrings, a choker necklace, and a hippie bus t-shirt three sizes too big. In one high school homecoming photo, I am bending over to fasten my seatbelt. Ducking below the window line of my date's red Mustang, the top of my black strapless gown is hidden and I appear to be completely naked in the passenger seat. I remember the billows of taffeta scratching my legs, the jolt of the car when he ran over two curbs out of nervousness, and the way his mom laughed and laughed upon seeing that photo.

I am the one who pulls out the family videos every few months, much to my youngest brother's horror. Being the baby, he hates when all eyes are on him and all his birthday videos show him hiding his head under the table cloth, begging everyone to stop singing happy birthday to him. I love the video of me and him on a windy, cold beach. He pokes his fluffy blond head out of the gigantic hole my dad dug and I bring him yards of seaweed to decorate this fort like a momma bird bringing food back to the nest. The video is taken from afar by my dad, unseen and distant straining the zoom feature to its max. It reminds me that we had this childhood play time together even though we are ten years apart. I am in eighth grade, almost lost to his barely four-year-old self.

My mom also hates this ritual, mainly because she gets sucked into watching the video despite her best efforts to stay away. She perches on the arm of the couch and shakes her head sadly saying how young and sweet those babies were. She mourns their loss like we aren't the grown versions of those tangled-hair toddlers laughing and leaping in front of the lens. In part she is right, those people are long gone, swallowed up in the march of time, existing now only in memory. Perhaps, this is why I like studying them so much, to trace my steps back on the path that will led me to my future. Without them, this motley succession of selves, I am only wandering.

I know he is right, even though I cringe as he uploads these candid shots to the internet. One day, I will look back and I won't see the smattering of moles across my cheek, the under-plucked eyebrows, or the unsightly bulge puckering above my elbow and around my hips. I'll see the young women I once was, still wondering about her future, just beginning in her first years of marriage, at a moment in-between youth and adulthood. I will laugh remembering the red pillows I bought for our bed and the smell of the golden retriever snuggling down into the comforter she was never supposed to be allowed on. This will be lost to me in the same way my favorite pink bunny doll with the twisty ears, the golden shoulder-length earrings, and grey Whittier sweatshirt are lost. I will turn to Paul and ask when this picture was taken. Why was my hair so short? Why, again, were we living in your parent's house? We will remember where we came from and wonder where we are going. Perhaps, my daughter will study this face in awe, trying to piece together who I was in that mysterious world that existed before she did. In the same way, I studied my mom's pictures: a delicately thin twenty-something standing at the stove of a house I can't remember in Florida; a teenager looking like a model with her soft layers of feathered hair as my grandfather snaps her senior portrait; and the child, who ran off to read books under trees, cuddling the family's pet raccoon. Did she smile with pride after baking her first cake or smirk with rebellion while brandishing multi-colored nails for the camera? Does she remember the heavy, warm weight of a brand new sibling or the rustle of her first formal dress?

It is only fair that I have this photojournalist husband, capturing truth in his own way, because, as he clicks away, I scribble in notebooks and type at my computer creating a net for those same flittering bits of truth. Together we collect these feelings, emotions, and moments like birds collecting bits of string, broken twigs, and shiny gum wrappers. Out of the ordinary stuff, mistaken by others as litter or leftovers, we are building ourselves a nest, our own intricate network of time threaded together to make some deeper sense of this world, a place to retreat when it all seems to be chaos and random chance. We can look back and see that even an everyday evening was significant, a strand woven in to hold our lives together.