I almost don't recognize the girl in the sepia-tinted photograph.
Oh, there is something vaguely familiar about her. Maybe the dimples or something around the eyes. But the hair is raven black and there isn't a wrinkle or age spot to be seen.
She's not looking at me disapprovingly over her glasses while I stumble through the flash cards I know by heart but decided, in a fit of pique, to be stubborn about. And she's not holding on to one of my hands while the doctor sews up the other after I determined turkey carving didn't look that hard.
At that point, in that picture, I'm not even a glimmer of a thought. Nor are my older sister or brother. Nor, in fact, is the sailor who was home on leave and who met her through a friend. The one who would write to her every day, telling her jokes and funny stories so she'd forget that he was on a destroyer in the middle of the Pacific and the world was at war.
In that picture, she's just a teenaged girl, standing with her brothers in the bright Oklahoma sun. The rest, all of it, would come later.
My children will barely recognize the little boy in the photo on the collage, up and to the left of that picture of their grandmother. He has dark hair almost kept in place with as much Vaseline as can physically be applied, in a vain attempt to conquer an Olympic-caliber cowlick. He's wearing a thin, clip-on bowtie and a look which confirms both that he has very large eyes in proportion to the rest of his face and flash photography is still very much a mystery to him.
He's holding his mother's hand. The stiches, they'll come later. As will enough height that the role of who is looking down on whom will be completely reversed. Later, also, will be the beautiful daughter-in-law. And the grandkids.
So many things will come later for the girl in that picture. She'll travel the world, far beyond the boundaries of her small town. She'll live on an island in the Caribbean. She'll fly, reluctantly, on an airplane. She'll sail, even more reluctantly, on a trawler.
She'll know fear, the fear that she and rest of the wives on the base will experience when, one after the other, their spouses come bursting through the front doors of their homes as the sirens blare and the bombers shoot skyward, one right after the other. She'll see her husband grab that flight bag that always lived in the hall closet and tell her, "I love you, I've got to go and I don't know when I'll be back."
She'll have disappointments. She'll have miscarriages. She'll bury all of those young men standing with her in that picture. She'll bury a son. Eventually, she'll bury her husband, who for 53 years, always did come back.
It's as if the people we love are actually two distinct persons. There are the people of the pictures, a teenager in a cheerleader outfit, a mother in an Easter dress holding on to her son, a man in a uniform or surrounded by his young family.
And there is the way they are now.
My mother turned 90 years old last Tuesday. We gathered to celebrate that, to remember the person we knew and discover the person that maybe we didn't. And then we sat for pictures, a tiny little grey-haired lady on a sofa surrounded by more than 20 people, 15 of them drawing breath of life directly because of her.
Those pictures will go up there on the collage, along with the ones of the high school girl, the young mother, the grandmother celebrating her husband's retirement. All different roles, different chapters of a life lived.
Like the little boy in that picture, with the shaft of hair starting to spring up in the back and startled look on his face. The boy you could hardly believe grew up to have the mustache that shows up in other pictures, or that wife or those kids.
Well, at least he had the good sense to get rid of that mustache. Or, his wife made sure he did.
In our memories, people are frozen in time. Just like they are in those photos. But they don't stay that way. They get older, they get greyer. Time marches on. They move from being young to no one believing they ever were.
But they know. They remember all of it. And they understand the rest just came later.
Commentary on 03/16/2018