Following Our Dreams All the Way Home

This is my father.
Nicotine stained, work-worn, full of fire, fueled by possibility.

He is a rascal, a maverick, a speculator, a pirate.  
He is hopeful.  He is unchanging.  He is mine.

He takes the long way home, so I can see the sunset across the bridge.  He tells stories about the car, how he bought it for seven hundred and eleven dollars a few months ago.  How they charge him next to nothing for insurance because they don’t expect him to be able to drive a thirty-year old car this fast.  I can barely hear him over the roar of the engine, over the sound of the wind whipping my hair around my face.  

We soar down the road like a rocket.

My whole life I can barely remember him even though I grew up in the house we both call our home.  He is busy.  He is traveling.  He is gone.  My mother pulls her coat over her pregnant belly in the winter and goes out to the patio to chop wood for the fireplace.  I’m sure there is a good reason for this, but I cannot remember it.  Where is my father?  I do not know.

The parts I do remember are like this.  He is calling home.  He is helping some homeless guy he just met. He is bringing home some Austrian backpackers who are shocked that they lock the churches here, and now they have nowhere to sleep.  He is talking to the man who is determined to end his life.  He is driving some guy to the emergency room, because he found him stabbed on the street.   He is collecting wildflowers off the side of the highway, because they are beautiful.  He is bringing home flowers for all of us, because we are his little women.

All this, I understand, with all my heart.

When he doesn’t call it is because he is smoking cigarettes in his office, adding up his dreams in lines of little numbers written in pen on paper napkins.  He is at the airport.  He is with the client at a restaurant.  He is selling something.  He is working harder than any man has ever worked before. He is waiting for this deal to come through.  He is waiting for his ship to come in. No matter what, there is always work and traveling and the sound of the television and the numbers on the napkins.  No matter what.

This I make peace with over years, over time.  I extract all the numbers until dreams form like poems on my napkins.  I learn to follow these dreams (just as he followed his) with all my heart.  

We are almost to the bridge now.  He tells me about the car, and how happy it makes him.  He tells me how beautiful the stars are overhead, when he drives with the top down late at night.  He tells me how they make him think of me.  How much he knows I would enjoy the view.   In this moment, his heart is as expansive as the sky above, and I can’t believe how lucky I am—to experience his love for me in this moment, so perfect, so complete.

He slows down at the top of the bridge, so I can capture the sunset.   I take twenty pictures as fast as I can, but in the end none means as much to me as this.   What more could I need than this love?  This forgiveness?  The memory of his hand at the wheel as we follow our dreams all the way home?

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May you discover the story of your life today, dear sisters, as you look through the lens with love in your eyes and hope in your soul.  Do you have a photo that is dear to you because of the story it tells your heart?   I'd be delighted to see your links in the comments below.

Love Thursday: February 28th, 2008

There's something I love about an image of a man caring for a young child.  And it's not just pictures of my husband with our daughter, either.  I think it has something to do with the fact that often men are expected to be strong, stoic,  and capable of subduing any signs of vulnerability -- so when I see a man being particularly tender or attentive with a child, I feel like I've been let in on a little secret. 

The photograph above was taken this past weekend:  a friend asked me to take pictures of her young daughters.  We met at a park, and I was so happy that her husband, B, decided to join us.  With the aid of my long 70-200mm lens, I was able to capture this special moment between daddy and daughter.  Thanks, B, for letting me in on the secret.

 Happy Love Thursday, everyone.  Please leave your links of images of love in the comments section, below -- and for inspiration, please check out the lovely image by Addicted to Coke left in the Shutter Sisters Flickr Pool.

And may you witness a tiny, secret moment of love today. 

projecting memories

 

My dad would lift me under the armpits, hoist me above his head so I could scramble onto the canal platform high above the deck of our boat. Then the same for my older brother. We’d find the gigantic wooden lever and push like vikings aboard a rowing ship, both of us, until it gave way to open the gates.

We’d watch as water burst through in streams, pressing against the expanding crack, filling the throughway. Mom and dad’s smiling faces rose above the wall and past our feet as the boat emerged from the crevice and we’d climb on board again. We meandered through northern England and Scotland this way, Easter break explorers.

Gliding under arched stone bridges hundreds of years old, so low we had to press ourselves to the deck to clear the underside of mossy rock. Along waterways lined with tall grasses and walking paths, generations of feet pressing the earth into a smooth, winding line for docking and towing and the stretching of legs. It was a rosy-cheeked adventure within an adventure, frosty mornings spent wrapped in fishermens’ knits and puffy jackets. British camping, it was, pastoral and gentle.

For a four-year-old with a mop, swabbing the decks is as close to heaven as you can get—second only, perhaps, to single-handedly operating a canal.

I say I’ll never forget that year we lived on a busy street in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Not cohesive remembering, but … well, like snapshots. But how much of that is me, and how much has been imprinted on my brain in the dark with a projection screen?

I adore slides. My mom and dad took thousands of of them, kept to this day in stacks of catalogued metal boxes at their house. Australia 1969. July-August 1979. Bedford 1987-88. Every few months we'd beg them to fill the Kodak carousel, unroll the soft, white screen, take us through another episode of our collective history.

Digital photography is all about blogs, flickr, unlimited gluttony. In a good way, but still—compared to the economy necessitated by film, does the digital medium dilute photography's magic with sheer volume? Can files on a laptop ever immerse our kids in vividness, saturate them with memory in the gloriously tactile way of slides and albums?

There’s nothing like a loaded carousel to tranform photographs into an occasion. For me, a pile of sharpie-marked CDs simply cannot compete.

What do you do to make the most of your family photography in the digital age? How will you keep your own adventures alive the way our parents used to, with dinner on fold-up TV tables in the cosy, flickering dark?

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The low-res scan of this slide (and of those on flickr) doesn't whatsoever do it justice. Apologies. All the photos are courtesy of my mom, who tells me she took them with an SLR in her hands for the first time. The drippy nose is courtesy of yours truly.

What I Remember

For many of us, taking the photos that document our lives is just a part of our daily routine. I shoot pictures of my children just about every day, but it wasn’t until the other night that the importance of each of these seemingly effortless images I snap away came into clear focus.

On the eve of my oldest daughter’s tenth birthday, I watched her pull from our family albums, her favorite baby pictures for use in her fifth grade auto biography. She mused over what she liked about each one and embellished with the details she remembered about them. It dawned on me that there really wasn’t anything she vividly remembered about the actual moment these photos were captured. How could she when she was just a baby? I imagine that what she was remembering were the photographs themselves. Revisiting the baby pictures she had grown up looking at stirred the memories of the photos themselves and the stories I have shared with her about them.

I listened as she reflected, I remember this one, I used to wear that orange outfit all the time, we called it my carrot suit. I loved that quilt, didn’t I? I remember Grandma made it for me. Oh, remember that I used to snuggle with that bunny. I love this picture. I heard her recalling her life as these photographs have narrated it for her. I too have photos like that--images of my young life that take me back to a moment in time that although may have slipped from my memory, is stirred up by both the picture and my mother’s stories. I guess it doesn’t really matter if I can remember these details or not, but I do have the photos as tangible proof that I had a grand first birthday party with a gazillion guests, that I wore my favorite Minnie Mouse dress on Easter and that I was “such a good little traveler” when my parents and I drove across the country in a Volkswagen Bus.

Hearing my own daughter speak of her baby days like that, like she actually remembers those days reminds me that when I am taking pictures I am doing something important. I am creating for her a visual treasury that she will have to help her remember her life. That I love doing it is just icing on the cake.