Ever now and then, often really, I get nostalgic. Its not a bad kind of nostalgia, not like I associate with Heidegger’s hermeneutics of recovery; I’m not trying to recover the lost source. But my nostalgia does carry a wistful tone.
Usually these nostalgic moments are triggered by something else, almost always a photo. Weirdly, they don’t have to be photos about anyone I know, they just have to look a certain way. This one, however, looks that certain way and is someone I know.
Its my mom on a trip we took to Niagara Falls. I’m fairly certain that those two little rain slickers in front of my mom are my sister and I, which means my dad is taking the picture. I don’t remember much of the trip, I was 5 at the time.
I like the half-turn, windswept face of my mother that is just a little out of focus. Images of people caught in the moment of living are so much more moving than the staged photos of people in front of historic sites. “Okay, everybody stand together in front of . . . ” is something I have never really been interested in.
This is probably from around the same time. Again, what I like about this, besides the reminder of my youth, is how its out of focus. Its like a half-forgotten memory (I would say ‘remembered’ but ‘half-remembered memory’ is oddly repetitive). I was probably the one taking the picture and it was probably one of those old 110 cameras. It was on our front steps in Mount Clemens. Check out those proto-Tevas my sister is sporting. They were leather, I had a pair myself. Somewhere there is an absolutely ludicrous picture of me “climbing” a tree in our front yard while wearing those. The tree was an oak, its lowest branch must have been 8 feet off the ground, while I had one foot up on the trunk and my hands raised at a staggered rate as if I were climbing a ladder.
Take more pictures. They might not mean much right now but years from now those images of you and your loved ones will be invaluable.
Sweet . . .