Family Pictures

Family Pictures

Sometimes I think I am more attached to the family pictures than I am to the family members they represent. I guess I’m lucky to be living during the Kodak epoch of human evolution because I have tons and tons, or more accurately, boxes and boxes of photographs, most of them of family members. My sister and I split up the many photographs my mother and father left—almost all in black & white, except for the ones of the grandchildren and of their 50th wedding anniversary party.

When I was a child, my Mother and my sister and I could spend a whole evening or a Sunday afternoon going through Mama’s boxes and albums of photos, memorizing by repetition that this one is of Aunt Olive just before she and Uncle William got married, and that one is of some long-ago friend from Oviedo. And here was Uncle Arthur, who my mother called Billy, in his dress blue navy uniform, the photo so precious now because he didn’t come home from the War. And here were my parents, looking young and beautiful and handsome and innocent, and different from how I knew them.

Over the years I’ve collected so many special photos—the ones in frames from my mother’s house of my two sets of grandparents, my father and all his brothers and sisters back when all were still living, my own little complicated family, with Larry and me and his two children and our child. And the photos of Jonathan in his special stages—young teenage idol, late teenage angry young man, little boy full of fun and love.

They say people rush to get their photographs when they have to evacuate their house. How would I ever choose among them?