“THE FADED PHOTOGRAPHS”

An eerie happening, I am about to relate. A few weeks ago, my mother handed me an envelope with eight photographs. Mysteriously, an old camera of my mother’s [forgotten for years] ended up in her sister-in-law’s [my aunt’s] possession. No one seemed to know to whom the camera belonged. I am convinced it was the little inexpensive camera I gave her one Christmas (1975?) It had been misplaced and forgotten all of those years. Funny. The value in price of an object is positively correlated to how quickly it can be misplaced. And forgotten.

My aunt had developed the pictures around 11-1/2 years after they were actually taken. And what do you think I found? You could barely make out the images in the pictures; they were images of my family: my mother, father brother, and myself. How did I know how old these pictures were? I am wearing a T-shirt that says, “GRACE”. I bought that shirt in February 1976, when I had begun to date my husband-to-be.

Back to the photos: they told me something. The pictures were always of three of the four of us; the fourth person was always taking the picture. We were smiling, as most people do when told to do so in front of a camera. But our actions, as demonstrated by the photographs, are indicative of where all four of us were at that point in time … going through the motions, doing what was asked or expected of us by each other.

In 1976, I have to think back to where were all really WERE. Thank God it wasn’t too long ago; maybe it was really only just yesterday. My brother was right in the middle of his college career. My parents’ marriage was falling apart—though, no real declaration had been made. I have just divorced my first husband, and was diving headfirst into another doomed-for-divorce marriage.

But we were smiling. Dad, with him impish grin, Mom with her “cheesy” smile, my brother with his boyish, yet sardonic face, and I with a statuesque expression of forced gaiety. All of the years of events of disappointment, grief, bitterness has never really taken place in my mind, until I realized the lives and lies that we all were actually wrestling with: my mother’s rejection by her “orthodox” parents in favor of two younger brothers [at least in my mother’s mind] my father’s grief that was present after his father committed suicide one summer evening on the front porch of their house in the country when my father was seven, and my brother had just been expelled from a small all-male college in the South, where he was sent to get “straightened out.” And then myself, destined to be in and out of relationships as frequently as Elizabeth Taylor.

All of these mysteries and secrets were locked behind a camera’s shutter. What a person usually sees when viewing through a camera is the world as we see it, as the camera sees it, at that point in time ONLY. But what that camera held onto, unknown to the people in the faded pictures, was not quite reality.

I realize this now, as I look back into the shadows of a past life. Those people were ghosts. But, at the present time, some of those people are becoming who they really want to be.

Some of them are still trapped behind that camera lens, fully undeveloped.

Note from the Author: Yes, this is all a true story. Every bit of it…..was a little surreal….when the developed pictures came back to me. A snapshot in time that no one had taken note of…the memory was faded and forgotten. Talk about flashbacks…and fast-forwards through the lives and losses of those photographed.

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