snapshots

My father didn't always take good pictures (or slides), and time did its worst to many. Some are out of focus, or pinkish as the color film of that time fades into oblivion. But some of them are good, really crisp and revealing personalities, and all are a window into times past.
As my father sank into Alzheimer's, my brother took a box of slides and photos Dad had taken over the years back to Louisiana with him. He had them turned into a CD, which he has shared with all of us.
Some of the photos date back as far as 1951. In a couple, my sister Deanna and I wear matching outfits, squinting against the sun. In one, I am clasping my hands to my chest in excitement.
Deanna is a toddler in the first ones, and I'm not much older. There are gaps. Boise and Iowa seem to have been skipped, and Yakima was mainly skimmed over. Wapato looms large, mostly birthdays, with candles lit on seven minute icing, in my case adorned with fresh rose blossoms. In one, Lois and Arnie are actually asleep in their seats at the double dinette set. Dad was probably working late, and Mom had held off the birthday party until his arrival. Deanna and I are wearing glasses that tilt up at the corners. In one, I have my hair in two ponytails with those roses tucked into the rubber bands. It looks like my 15th birthday.
Then there is Arizona. I stayed in the Yakima Valley with the minister and his family to finish my junior year. There are quite a few photos without me --- their visits with relatives in California, and their first months in the mobile home in the middle of the desert.
In many of the Arizona family portraits, we are all squinting against the sun. There is a shot of Oak Creek Canyon near Sedona, taken from above the water's swift course downhill.
That's where I took nearly all the skin off the front of my left leg while whooshing down the sandstone waterslide, turning the first weeks of my senior year in a new high school into a limping litmus test.
In one picture, I am shown forking pit-barbecued meat onto my plate at a church picnic, Terry Juarez proudly presiding over the carving knife. My hair is in curlers, and Grandma Juarez can be seen, all four foot three of her, behind my elbow.
In another Arizona shot, I am playing guitar with sheet music held in front of me. This was during the first part of my folk music phase, and I am merely tolerating the gospel tune I am playing to accompany the other church folk. I'm sure I would have rather been playing a traditional Appalachian or English folk song. During that year, Mom smashed my Joan Baez records, as I discovered after coming home one day from school. I had long straight hair much of that year, and wore "granny" dresses I made myself, with long, lace-trimmed sleeves. I was surprised to find in the photos that my hair had been cut short before graduation. I didn't remember that. In the cap and gown shots, I look positively loopy.
By that time, I knew I was bound for Midwestern School of Evangelism in Iowa, largely against my will. There was a year and a half when Dad and I did not communicate at all.
Dad's photos that include me resume in the early '70s, when I was living in Portland with Alan and they were building the house at Skamania.
There's only one existing snapshot of me in San Francisco. I tucked it into a long descriptive letter that Mom kept a lot of years. Reading that letter again was a revelation. I was candid about what was happening then, and about Trent, the drummer I was living with at the time.
Shortly after sending that letter, I became quite ill with hepatitis.
I had to be fetched from San Francisco and hospitalized. After that, I sang in coffeehouses around Vancouver and Portland, and went on the road with a band based in D.C.
I was back in Portland living with Alan when Mom and Dad bought the Skamania property. There are photos of the rocky expanse, and the beginnings of construction. We came up a few times on weekends to help. There are photos of Alan and I, taken by Dad along a rock wall in the Columbia Gorge in some sylvan spot. In them, Alan is beautiful. They are the only photos I have of him now. I cried when I discovered them on the CD of Dad's photos.
Those pictures were taken before I left Alan and went back to San Francisco, where an anonymous customer took an instant snapshot of me, (turn about's fair play), as I was demonstrating Kodak instant cameras. The svelte woman in the photo whom I barely recognize is wearing a snug turquoise knit top and the turquoise heart necklace William brought back from Peru. I no longer have it, and it had developed a crack before it got lost in the detritus.
Not long after that, I went to New York. That's where I later got the news that Alan had hung himself in the woods near OHSU. He had visited me in my apartment at Bretton Hall on the upper West Side. We went out to hear some music, and he slept on the floor. He had a new girlfriend in Boston and had seemed quite positive about recent changes in his life. Then I got the call from Mike Kearsey, the bass-player in Upepo, telling me Alan was dead.
About 1979 or 1980, that same period of time, someone snapped a picture of me sitting at a table between sets at my regular gig at the Red Rooster in Harlem.
I hardly recognize that woman, either. She has a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, and a cold Heineken is next to it. She also has a tape deck and an open fakebook in front of her. She is probably looking up tunes for the next set.
The upholstery on the booths is red velvet, and the mirror behind her is dark. She is wearing a lacy jade-colored sweater, and a sly grin.
No one takes snapshots any more, except with instant cameras or their cell phones. At recent family gatherings, the digital photographers in the bunch take images that are shared, but they show people opening presents or carving turkeys. They don't reveal much personality.
There are a few recent digital photos taken of me, a fat older person I would prefer not to recognize. My youngest sister grabbed a few shots at a 4th of July gig. The guitar player looks downright grim in most of the photos (I hope that is concentration), and I notice that I have a very big mouth when I sing.
Then there are a couple of hilarious blurry shots someone took of me singing in my Madrigal Feast outfit. I do not make a good picture, although I take other people's pictures all the time as part of my job. I don't do a lot of snapping away at family gatherings either, like I used to.

Dad has been gone more than a year now. I am glad that we have Dad's old pictures. Sometimes I buy flowers or a plant, but they don't last long. His pictures have lasted quite a while longer, though quietly languishing in a box in the closet many years.
Now they are a window to the past that I'm grateful to have.