Friday, April 11, 2008

Early Chapters and Late

No one has the relationship to the little boy in the picture below that I do. It is a photograph from one of four albums that my mother prepared thirty years ago, one album for each of my three brothers and one for me. Without retaining any memory of the occasion on which the photograph was “snapped,” I know that it is a picture of me returning from school one day.

I presume the person who took this photograph was either my father or my mother, standing between the two lugustrum shrubs that flanked our front walkway in New Orleans. I can’t claim to know for sure why I am running. We didn’t ordinarily use the front door of our house; it led into a formal living room that was carpeted, and my brothers and I were normally not permitted through it when we first came home from school. Perhaps we had unexpected family visitors that day, and I was heading as fast as I could to the back door of our house to get into the house and greet them.

When my parents died, two people vanished who could effortlessly link in their minds the child in the picture of that school day with the grown man forty years later entering their home on visits two and three times a year and driving them to doctors’ offices and picking up meals for them at the nearby Piccadilly Cafeteria. It is hard for me to realize that they could have watched me walking through their house during those visits and pictured in their mind earlier times when I had walked through without a beard, without a job, without Marc.

In the entry hall of our house, there is a photograph of Marc and me from a visit we had made to New Orleans the first summer after we moved in together. We are on our way to breakfast at Brennan’s. Marc is wearing a seersucker suit, and I have my yellow tie and blue shirt and grey flannels. We are flush with the excitement of a warm welcome from my family and a sense of something working out in our lives that we might sometimes have despaired of ever seeing.

To my eyes over twenty years later on the eve of our anniversary, these two men in their mid-thirties look young.

I marvel that there are people in our lives now who can effortlessly link in their minds the picture of Marc and me on our way to Brennan’s with the men twenty years later welcoming them into our home and eating with them around the dining room table. I pause in wonder that friends and family can watch Marc and me walking through our home during their visits and can picture in their mind the earlier times when we all of us walked through other homes, talked through other jobs, and tried to glimpse the future chapters of our lives.

8 comments:

Kimberly said...

There is a line in a Mary Oliver essay that says, "We are, none of us, cute." She was suggesting the limitations of that description and how creation is far bolder, far more intimate and interior, far more worthy of admiration for a simplicity of purpose and being, than that word conveys.

So, I intentionally forgo that word, though the smile and what I know suggest it.

That said, this photo and your words draw me in this morning... a little boy saying "Come, see my world. I have things to show you that I may or may not yet know about."

be well...and HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!

Vic Mansfield said...

As I look back through my journey, old pictures, old memories, I some times wonder where he is, that little boy. And sometimes I wonder where is this man, this adult I am "supposed" to be.

Is the man still young? or the boy, old?

Congratulations, Shalom & Blessing on your years together.

John said...

The little boy in the picture wants people in his world but does not know how safe that will be. He has his strategies, has his smiles, has his hopes. It's just going to take time for him to suspect all that might be waiting for him.

Thank you both for your kind wishes!

Anonymous said...

Something from Thoreau for this beautiful little boy:

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler. Solitude will not be solitude. Poverty will not be poverty. Nor will weakness be weakness."

Anonymous said...

Beautiful post.... I like Jim's comment above with the Thoreau quote. Beautiful.

DanFred said...

That's one happy little kid. Although he doesn't know it yet, the world is before him, full of possibilities. We all should recall those times. Possibilities fade like old photos. Best to take them out and dust them off once in a while.

Ur-spo said...

you have a nice way with words
and I enjoyed this post.
thank you for it.

John said...

So we're up against one of those mysteries, aren't we? When and how does an individual life, an individual heart first come to know the truth of Thoreau's words and to trust them? Some people seem to absorb an invitation like Thoreau's almost instinctively. Some of us carry these words and so many other wise texts in our school satchels for years, hoping one day to taste afresh and for ourselves what words like these promise.

Thank you, good readers, for attending to my own words and letting me know how they touch you.