A slip in Time: Pictures on the ‘Fridge (1/7/1989)

In my job, I am occasionally called upon to use a camera.

It’s not one of those complicated rigs used by the pros. Mine is a little box with a minimum of buttons and no folderol. One points, sights through the little window, and pushes the button.

Over the years, I’ve stopped a lot of moments with that little camera; happy times, silly sights, mundane civic ceremonies, fender-benders, and tragedies.

Often, people ask me not to take their pictures. Sometimes I go along with them. I know how they feel; I get a funny, naked sort of feeling inside when somebody points a camera at me.

Members of primitive societies are often fearful of cameras and photographs. They believe that the camera contains a demon that steals their soul, imprisoning it on the photographer’s paper. Some aspiring actors, actresses and politicians might agree, when photographs of themselves appear, taken years earlier in inconvenient situations or positions. The devils, in these cases, are usually those in possession of the photographs.

What the photographer really does, of course, is steal time.

Perhaps “steal” is inaccurate. The photograph is more like a tracing of an event, inexact, often blurry, certainly only two-dimensional and lacking the sounds and smells and motion of the event depicted. It is a whisper, a hint, as fossil dinosaur footprints imbedded in shale only hint at what may have been the drama of the creature’s final moments.

As a traditional repository of family snapshots, the refrigerator is a sort of fossil bed, an enameled steel La Brea Tar Pit of our abbreviated histories. Under cute magnets disguised as everything from doughnuts to farm animals are pinned grocery lists, notes to remind us to pick up Aunt Harriet at the bus terminal, invoices from the kid who delivers the Sunday paper, and photographs, of friends, children, kith and kin.

Part of this past holiday season I spent at the home of my cousin Tom in western Pennsylvania. Like other families in what the social scientists are now calling the Post-Industrial Age, ours is as scattered as papers on a windy street, to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, California. The holidays are the one time of the year when as many of us as can manage come together.

I can remember Tom driving me around in my uncle’s yard in his first car. He piloted the vehicle self-consciously over the brown summer grass. I don’t remember what kind of car it was, only that it was huge, black, and round as a beetle, and it smelled like all old cars smell. Tom was 16, then, and I was 8.

Now he is 48, graying, an engineer. In his garage, aloof from the two everyday cars in the drive and hidden under a tarp in the semi-darkness is a Corvette. It lurks there, muscular and sexy under the canvas, like a secret passion, an incarnation of what that first car probably was in his teenage dreams. It seems to be waiting for a secret release. I don’t know. I have never ridden in it, never heard its engine.

The visit to my cousin’s house carried with it all the emotional depth that such things bring with them. Mostly, that is a good thing. Caught up in my job and with the everyday details of my immediate family and acquaintances, it was good to go back to the center, to tap into the root of blood, time and experience and rediscover, if not who I am, then at least the common cloth from which I was cut.

Notable by their absence, even after some years have passed, were those who had died. Their likenesses peered down from the walls and from desktops, smiling outside a Florida condo or staring stiffly from a brown studio portrait taken sometime in the early decades of this century.

There are faces I have never seen in person, yet behold echoed in the mirror every morning, and glimpsed, transformed and altered by heredity, standing and sitting in the living room of Tom’s house.

On the refrigerator in the kitchen, along with the memos and grocery store coupons and notes are photographs of Tom’s sister, Lynn, and her two children. The photo of the youngest, Nicole, looked so much as her mother had as a toddler that I had a giddy moment when I slipped 30 years back, when smiling people carried a sleeping girl into our home in Georgia after a long drive through Appalachia on two-lane highways.

Of course, it was only an illusion, a trick of the brain. Memory and perception had tangled with predictable results. I was only looking back a little way, seeing a few links in a long chain of time and converging ancestry.

Looking at the picture of Nicole, whom I had mistaken for her mother, I had a moment of sudden fear, as though I had found myself standing at the very edge of a dark abyss.

I realize then that on the night I remembered, when the weary travelers had come through the door in the small hours of the night, that I am now the same age as were the adults who stood in that room.

With only two exceptions, all have now gone, their atoms returning to the still earth, leaving behind a few material items, some photographs, and some moments in the minds of a few who still live.

I carefully put the photo of little Nicole back under its magnet. In the reflection of the oven window I could see the ghost of my father walking in the bones of my face. I saw others in there as well, looking out from time, from a particular mix of genes.

From the next room came a loud burst of laughter; there was conversation and merriment going on out there, and I was standing in the kitchen, communing with ghosts. I picked up my coffee cup, grabbed an extra Christmas cookie from the tray while no one was looking. I looked back at the reflection, gave us all a wink and went back to the party.

I don’t think anyone took any photographs that night. I hope they did. And, who knows, maybe someday, 30 years from now, a young woman named Nicole, visiting her Uncle Thomas’s home in Pennsylvania will look at a dimming old photograph in the family album and wonder who all those laughing people were.

 

 

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

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