literature

The Photo Album, V02

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My mother’s photo albums had existed as a private collection for as long as I could remember. They numbered well over a hundred by the time of her death and were housed in an 1888 barrister bookcase that had belonged to her grandfather. The challenge, she once told me, had been to find photo albums that were similar in thickness, height and binding to the first one she had in 1944 when, at the age of seven, she started her first photo album with an impressive new camera from an uncle on her birthday.

That first album, which lived at the bottom, left corner of the barrister bookcase for the next 60 years, contained an unusually large number of pictures of her parents and brothers sleeping, invoking Victorian images of photos of the dead. The penmanship under each photo was that of a girl just learning cursive, and each chronicled the photo by month, year, name(s) of the photographed and town the photo was taken in.

The symbiosis of it all was important to her. She remembered the bookcase in her grandfathers’ study, containing law books she never opened; all the same height, the same leather used to bind them. It was the way she registered each photo in her albums; meticulously chronicling the salient details of each photo, preserving the moment.

There are thousands of photos in 157 albums in the barrister bookcase; most lack a citation as to the photographer – everyone should assume it was my mother. The few pictures that include her number less than 70 in the 157 photo albums that chronicle her life from the ages of seven to 67. If you take the time, as I have, to sift through each picture, to find her story, the pattern of these 63 photos will emerge. 60 of them were taken in March; she is always in a party dress, she is always bright-eyed, she is always on the verge of blowing out all the candles.

There is one black and white photo of her at a dressing table, her sister fitting a veil over her hair, a very young cousin in a white lacy dress and white Mary Jane shoes over white bobby socks smoothing the white train behind her. My mothers’ face is serene as it looks into the mirror that the photographer catches her in. This photo was recreated on my wedding day and both pictures have been enlarged to an 8X10 portrait and hang side-by-side on my bedroom wall.

In the other two photos, she’s in bed, holding a small bundle in her arms, my father standing, leaning awkwardly with his arm around her. In one photo she wears a blue gown, a yellow gown in the second, her face is sweaty, she is not so bright-eyed. The citation under each of these two photos reads, simply, “Dr. Brown”.

I am an only child.

I believe I am the bundle in my mothers’ arms in the second photo. Without a telling caption, I base this belief on the fact that the photo to be found directly before the yellow gown photo taken by Dr. Brown is of my grandmother, alone and in a black dress, smoking a cigarette on the front steps of the retirement home she moved into after her husband died, weeks before I was born. My mother always said she felt incredibly guilty for not being able to take her own mother into her home, but, she would always sigh, she couldn’t handle a new baby and an old woman. The photo directly after the yellow gown photo is of a baby wrapped in a pink blanket, sleeping in the arms of a young boy and holding his finger. He wears a striped shirt and is smiling the way only four year olds do. The caption is dated one week after my birth and does not name the photographed, followed by the name of the town we left when I was two.

If you look closely at the pictures, as I have, you find the boy there when I learn to crawl and he’s there when I’m held by my grandmother for presumably the first time. He’s making snow angels at my first Christmas, he’s sitting next to dad on the couch when I look into the eyes of Aunt Stacy’s labrador retriever and all the adults laugh, he’s covering his ears when I’m screaming, crying over some forgotten injustice, and he’s there in so many of the times in between.

The boy is at my 1st birthday party. You have to search for him, as he’s overshadowed in all of the photos taken between my birth and my second birthday party. He’s blowing up a balloon with another boy of the same age in the far-right corner of a photo of my father rolling on the floor with me in his hands, high above his head. My father and I are both smiling and I look like every other baby in my white frilly dress and white bobby socks. One of my shoes is on my father’s belly and the other is not in the photo.

If you’ve done the math, as I have, you know there should be 2.62 albums for each of the 60 years chronicled by my mother. This is not the case. There are far less pictures taken between my 2nd birthday and my mothers’ 67th birthday party, two weeks before she died and I started searching the pictures for something she forgot to tell me, a moral to her story, something I forgot to listen for in her words. For the 11 years of her childhood, from the age of seven to 18, there are ten albums. Film and albums being costly for a child without an allowance, I’m sure the pennies were scrimped to pay for these precious memories.

The next nine years produce another 25 albums, mostly of girls getting ready to go out, family affairs, friends’ weddings, and a surprising number of my future father doing headstands and leaning against buildings, smoking. The Navy took him away until my mother was 27. The pictures are few and far between during this time and no one is smiling in any picture until one of my father, waving like a madman from a train. It’s blurry, but I can tell it’s my father, halfway through album 25. My mothers’ wedding picture is in this album and several pictures of palm trees and beaches, taken on their honeymoon to Florida. I remember sitting down with my mother to look through old photos once. Album 25, with its palm trees and beaches pictures, is as far as we ever got together.

Album 25 has seven empty pages at the end of it. The first picture taken by Dr. Brown lacks a caption, but is presumably the first photo of the boy, and it appears as the first picture on the first page of album 26. Pictures of the boy fill sixteen albums over the course of the next 4 years.

The first page of album 52 features the yellow gown and bundle. The next two years produce 40 albums. 40 albums of mostly me, although the boy can be found in the background of most of these pictures. Looking at these pictures now I find it difficult to believe I never noticed the boy before, as I’ve seen all of these pictures over the years. My mother pulled out these 40 albums the night Billy told my parents we were engaged. She pulled them out for my daughters’ first birthday party, to recreate the picture like mine, and made everyone look at the albums for the rest of the night. Weddings, funerals, parties; she brought them out of their barrister bookcase at every family affair. The boy looks remarkably like my father but he has my mothers’ ears. He stands the way I do today, with my feet pointed out, head cocked to one side.

My grandparents have all been gone for decades, from pancreatic cancer, heart attack, car accident and emphysema. My father died when I was 26, one brother MIA in Vietnam and the other lost to the Navy in 1972. My mothers’ sisters died of breast cancer in 1975 and a stroke last year, and now my mother is gone. I don’t know who her friends were in those days and none of her friends now know who the boy was.

The last picture of the boy is at my 2nd birthday party. This photo can be found in album 92. The boy stands to my right as I blow out the candles with the help of my father. The photo has been staged from the same angle as all of the pictures of my mother on her birthday. I’m too young to be standing on tip toe like her or to even blow out the candles, so I’m seated and my father blows from the side. The boy just watches.
I would greatly appreciate advanced critique of this story as I plan to submit it.
© 2005 - 2024 LaurieDionne
Comments8
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JKnox's avatar
i really enjoyed this piece.
the numbers were a bit much for me but to be honest i just kept going.
the point is made regardless.
i too was confused over the father's brother's deaths. i too thought they were the speaker's brothers.
the ambiguity of the ending is both frustrating and i think right.
the theme of the photographs i think is an excellent idea.
i would enjoy more imagery, more senses involved, but overall a very solid piece.