The Photograph

I held the photograph in my hands.  APR ‘87 was scribbled in smeared ink on the back.  That was the only clue as to my exact age.  Puts me at seven years old.  The photograph was slightly blurry.  Not edited and airbrushed, not cropped to remove any background foliage, clouds, telephone wires, unnecessary humans.  As if the existence of other objects ruined the memory.   

They say “a picture is worth a thousand words.”  This one was worth infinitely more than that.  It was my childhood with my grandfather, all wrapped up in that one blurry snapshot at the park.  Me, unadulterated smile, holding a kite, hair blowing playfully as only a child’s hair can blow and still look enchanting.  I looked free, pure, not encumbered by the wind.  You could almost hear the wind, and our laughter.  My grandfather, smiling, lines creased around his eyes, which were quite blurry through his glasses.  I don’t know if it was the timeworn quality of the photograph that blurred his glasses, or the fact that they were always blurry.  He was too focused on life to bother cleaning them.  I guess he saw everything through blurry lenses, which made him easygoing, informal.  His windblown hair made him look more like a mad scientist than my grandfather, but his hair was always what had endeared him to me.  He was too busy living his life to have it cut.  Only when it started impairing his vision would he make it into the barber.  His weathered hands held the kite handle over my tiny ones.  I remember that day…we had waited for a windy day.  Windy enough to send a message from us up to the top of the kite.  My grandfather’s humor…hey, kid, let’s send a message up to the sky.  We scribbled a note, “How’s the weather up there?  It’s windy down here,” folded it and taped it around the kite string, with enough wriggle room for it to make its way up the string.  I can still feel our absolute delight, watching the paper move up the string.  It didn’t matter how long it took.  Time was abstract, and I loved being with my grandfather, so the longer it took, the better.  

We had set out to get the message up the string, not to take the photograph.  My mom must have snapped it quickly, waiting who knows how long to get it developed.  I remember she had to fill the whole roll of film before she could eject it from the camera.  We were patient back then.  The excitement we felt as we walked into the drugstore and picked up our pictures was overwhelming.  We got to relive months of memories within that roll of film.  

Each photograph cost something, so the pictures were taken with care, and there was much disappointment when someone blinked, or moved and created a blur.  There was no way to recreate that moment.  Sometimes the photographs were overexposed, or underexposed.  We wouldn’t know how the photograph had turned out until Mom got around to developing them.  There was mystery, anticipation.

My sisters and I fought over who looked through the roll first, Mom admonishing us to hold them by the edges so we wouldn’t get our grimy little fingerprints on the photographs.  Nostalgia overwhelmed me.  It was the first time I’d held a photograph in years, the first time my grandfather had crossed my mind in quite some time.  I had found the photograph stuffed in a box in the garage, way back behind the dusty Christmas decor, underneath some old yearbooks and letters my mom must have saved.  Out of ingrained respect for her, I held the photograph by the edges.

“Look, Dad!  Her life is so perfect.” I was quickly shaken out of my sentimental reverie.

My daughter walked into my office with her iPad.  She had Instagram pulled up and quickly scrolled through numerous images of her best friend.  It was a showcase of her summer.  Bikini-clad at the beach, posed to perfection, with her family in Hawaii, all smiling, camping in Yosemite, in a Sprinter van, at a Taylor Swift concert, blonde hair curled flawlessly, all the images having one thing in common.  She had taken them herself, of herself.

No background clutter, no passerbys accidentally trapped in her Insta feed, not even her pretty white teeth showing.  She had that smolder that has replaced the carefree smile of my youth.

“I remember a time before selfies,” I told my daughter, a strange aching pressure rising in my chest.

I turned my one blurry, faded photograph towards her.  She looked at it carefully, studying the happy-go-lucky little boy in a plain red t-shirt, and the old man in his trademark blue plaid, forever captured in a time that was more simple.  She absent-mindedly scratched her head, messing up her already messy bun.  

“Who’s that?”

“Me and my grandfather.  We loved to fly kites together.  I couldn’t even think of taking pictures, I was so content to be with him.  My mom must have taken this.  It’s the only picture I have of the two of us.  He never sat still long enough for a photograph.”

I had never taken a selfie.  My definition of a picture was of what I could see, the people I could see, the beauty around me, not of myself.  Cameras were invented facing outward, not meant to be flipped around.  They were there to capture what the eye saw.

I looked at the images on my daughter’s iPad.  Appealing, for sure.  Colorful, beautiful, exotic, unblemished, all focused on one person.

No waiting, no mystery, no disappointment if someone blinked, because there were ten others to choose from, always the option to delete and take another from a more flattering angle.

Which was better?  A single photograph, the only one I had of my grandfather and me, slightly blurry, other park-goers in the background, forever cemented into my photograph.  Or ten images (I can no longer call them photographs, by definition), bodies posed flawlessly, lighting perfect, due, I’m sure, to the editing.  Any that weren’t perfect, deleted forever with a click of the trash icon.  We can’t show anything less than perfect, can we?