Photographs

The pictures in their frames lining the wall of the upstairs hall – children and parents, on vacations at the lake, outside in the yard, family gatherings, everyone at different ages – mostly it seems the children are aging – though the hair of the adults charts the timeline – different styles on the women, different quantities for the men. Some pictures have pets or family friends, there are grandparents and uncles and aunts no longer with us, there is one wedding portrait – and these are his family, his children, his cousins and sisters and step-sisters and parents and aunts and uncles – even himself in the wedding portrait. That was him on vacation at the lake, him at the family reunion, him in the backyard – him with different people – him with more or less hair. That was him in those pictures, him with people he knew – his family and friends – even though he didn’t look a them very often – him with his two sisters on a beach on Cape Cod quite a few years ago - it was October and they wore jackets and sweaters and had carved pumpkins. He didn’t stop very often on his way from his bedroom down the hall and down stairs. Hanging over the stairs was another picture, a large and very old photograph of his children’s great grandparents, a wedding portrait which, after they had both died and their house was being cleaned out – ransacked by surviving family before the auctioneers got there – no one else seemed to want. So his wife, incredulous that the portrait was going unclaimed, brought it home and hung it. He didn’t look at the pictures very often, even though these were all people he knew – he could remember the sounds from when the pictures were taken and sometimes he could remember what they had said right before or right after the photograph had been taken – there was the feeling that his image had been placed in the picture after the fact, as if somehow he only existed for that tiny moment. As if the intervening time between then and the moment he looked at the image never happened, as if somehow, even though it was him, somehow it wasn’t the same him -