It is an old photo, worn and a bit stained, missing a chunk here and there, as if it had spent much too much time in a plastic sleeve in the dark recesses of an overloaded wallet. Which, in fact, it had, until I decided to pry it out and digitize it, in an attempt to save it before it was lost to me for good. Framed neatly in the center of the picture are a small boy and a tall man, standing by a fence near some body of water; there seems to be a large bird in the background as well. It’s hard to know for certain, but I think that we’re somewhere at the Jersey shore, on a pier or jetty. The little guy is me, at what I’m guessing is age 4 (which would make this 1957); the big guy is my dad, who in ‘57 would have been 45 years old, a decent bit younger than I am now. The shore was a favorite day-hop getaway for my folks, even in winter. You can tell it’s winter by the outfits; in addition to his coat my dad is wearing his gloves, and I’m wrapped up head to toe in a suit I still remember – a wool cap with earflaps, wool coat, gloves, wool pants and leather leggings (something which, as I look back on it, must have resembled the leather putees that soldiers in World War I wore). I think I looked pretty spiffy, if I must say so myself. I certainly was warm, if maybe a tad itchy. It could be Atlantic City, since I recall that even in the off-season there were some things on the Boardwalk that stayed open; a few souvenir shops, some restaurants,the penny arcades.
Those pre-electronic age arcades had lots of things to amuse a four-year-old. There were the mechanical baseball, hockey and football games, real clanking, clunking pinball, shooting galleries, wheel-of-fortune style games of chance, and one of those booths that, for a few quarters, allowed you to make a short recording of your voice on a 45 RPM disc. My father and I made one of those recordings, perhaps the very day this photograph was taken. I do remember being bunched up in the tiny booth with him; he was hugging me tight so that he could both maximize the limited amount of space available to us, and, at the same time, hoist me up close to the microphone, as my mother looked on from outside. He asks me to talk all about space and rocket ships, a favorite subject of mine at the time. He also encourages me to sing a song, which I do, although by then it becomes clear that the novelty of this recording session is wearing off and I’m getting eager to move on to something else.
I still have that old recording, sitting on a shelf with the Beatles, the Stones, Herman’s Hermits and all the other 45’s I had as a kid. It is hard for me to listen to it now; not only because the disc itself is difficult to play on my modern stereo turntable, and almost unintelligible as well, but also because there is too much of me on it, and not enough of my dad. It is the only thing I have that has his voice on it, a voice I haven’t heard in almost fifty years. Nowadays we are awash in home audio-video; most kids born in the last 20 years will be able, with a bit of editing, to assemble an entire documentary multi-episode mini-series of their early lives, running only about 3 hours shorter than the real thing. Most of these video kids will have hours upon hours of Mom and Dad on tape and DVD as well, beginning with the wedding video and progressing through the gruesome details of their own birth and beyond, until it may well be that it gets to the point where no one will notice that their parents are actually dead until they get around to viewing the footage shot at the funeral.
I’ve never liked the home video camera; ours is one of the few families that doesn’t own one. Its presence always felt so intrusive to me, especially at formal occasions like weddings, First Communions or graduations, since almost everyone present (including, in some cases, the direct participants) are standing up or roaming about, straying into aisles and up onto platforms, thrusting their cameras out like so many ill-mannered papparazzi. Nobody is actually paying attention in any meaningful way to what’s going on; it is as if the reality of the event will be defined solely by its existance on some sort of electronic media, and not really experienced by those who were there until they sit down in front of the television, hours later, and finally watch what went on. Anything and everything is grist for the video mill: soccer games or afternoons lounging in the backyard pool, school plays or a Frisbee toss with the dog, trips to Washington DC to see the sights or to grandma’s house for Sunday supper; it all gets put on tape or disc for posterity. The ubiquity and sheer quantity of this unending documentary footage will have the effect of ultimately diminishing the genuinely special moments in our lives; any true significance lost in the morass of the blow-by-blow banality of it all.
Photographs, though, are different. Since they freeze selective moments in time, and are not simply transcriptions of an event the way a video can be, they serve almost as a mnemonic; a clue or a hint that opens up a whole host of memory and associations. “Every picture tells a story”; so goes the old phrase, and the older the photograph the more of the story we know, especially how parts of it inevitably end, while others go on and form the basis of yet another narrative. I know all too well how this one comes out. If this is 1957, as I think it is, then the 45 year-old-man in the photograph, my father, will live for only another five years. My mother took very few photographs after he was gone; I have some of my confirmation, taken by an aunt and uncle, but none of birthdays, or proms, or graduations. Perhaps it was best that my mother in her grief gave up on the taking of pictures; they would have only re-inforced his absence at these turning points in my life. Those few pictures I do have, especially of him, are triggers for a host of images and memories; fragile, imperfect, unsure of the details. At some point during one winter day in 1957 my mother stopped for a brief moment to take a snapshot of her “boys,” before the three of us went on to do the things we always did when we went to the shore in winter: walk on the Boardwalk, eat lunch in a restaurant, spend a few coins in the penny arcade, buy a box of saltwater taffy, stop in a booth to make a record of the four-year old me pontificating about the future of space travel and singing a verse of “Camptown Races”. This picture, and that old, barely comprehesible recording, is all I have; but it is enough. Memory is flawed; there are things I’m not sure about, details that are fuzzy. In a way that I can’t even begin to explain, though, it is enough. Perhaps it is precisely because the memory lacks the detail a video would have, I get to re-create and recast that day again and again in my mind, each re-imagining allowing for the serendipitous recall of a hitherto long-forgotten moment, or smell, or sound, or feeling, each adding another layer to the story. A man and a boy; a father and his son, a cold winter’s day at the shore that will end with a ride home in our 1950 Plymouth DeLuxe, the boy tucked between his mom and dad on the front seat, eased slowly into sleep by the steady rumble of the tires on the pavement, the static-y lullaby of Perry Como on the AM radio, and their hushed conversation. As I said, I don’t really know, for absolute certain, if this photograph was taken the same day I made that recording, but it comforts me to think that it might have happened that way. All this, from one cracked and faded image. All this, from memory.
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