When I was twenty, I didn’t see the point in photographs.
I walked through Europe and an Alaskan vacation, a trip to Kansas and one to Tennessee, not capturing a single frozen memory. I brought back nothing to take out later and say, if only to myself, “Remember when?”
People told me I’d regret it. I’m sure I don’t — though not so sure if that’s because its true or because I’m stubborn and, at the distance of two decades, still trying to prove them wrong. Those people whose faces have faded from the film of my mind.
But it wasn’t just stubbornness, even at the time. Not all adolescent pique that made me leave the camera my parents’ bought in the bottom of a drawer. There was some true desire there, wrapped in that muted rebellion.
In Florence, I stood beneath the David in wonder and wandered later across a bridge and along a road where there were villas behind brick walls, and (I’ll say for the purpose of setting the scene) grape arbors, though they might have been fruit trees.
It was Easter, and I was in Florence, and I saw it all through the lens of my own eye. Took it in and did not worry how I might frame it to take it out, later, at some other time, show bored friends who hadn’t been there.
I was there, fully, for a moment, and thought it was enough.
It was enough.
Why do I question it now?
Perhaps. Well.
Perhaps because there was a sadness there, somewhere, beneath the elation of letting the world hit you in the face, no mechanical aperture between you and raw air.
Somewhere, captured frozen in memory, were snapshots in the boxes of the woman who’d died. Kodak envelopes full of children in front of Christmas trees, forever seven years old and brandishing stuffed ponies. Orphans now. No one knows where they came from. Are those Jenny’s boys? Or Uncle Ted’s? Who knows? The woman’s dead, and all the things she’s carried twist away like the brown petals of cut flowers left too long in a vase. Pictures, in the end, shrivel, too. Go down to dust the way that all things do.
So, yes. It’s true. I stood in the glory of Florence, and also on high mountains looking over waterfalls and was not greedy. I took away only what my mind could carry, and that was good, in its way.
But now.
Now I keep my camera with me, tucked in a back pocket. I take it out often, the dogs pulling, anxious on the leash. I point it at sunsets and lichen on rocks; on the boy in the distance and the arc of his bat as it swings over the plate, missing the ball; I take it all in. Carry it out with me. Look at it later, and am, I hope, a little less afraid of losing what has already gone.
The words, the photograph, the memory, all three something else entire. Not a useless holding on, a grasping at what won’t come back. But rather — oh. How do I say it?
The image penetrates the aperture, and leaves behind, not (as I thought) a scar but rather a growing thing. A testament to holiness, a witness to beholding.
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