The Request

In March this year my husband and I decided it was time to repaint the entire inside of the house, the walls, the ceilings, and to rewallpaper the bathroom, update the furniture in the living room and bedrooms, and have a contractor come in to remodel the kitchen from the floor up. The entire project is due to be finished by the end of this month. In the process, a lot of cabinets have been gone through, and a lifetime of picture albums were brought back to memory and presence. I noticed that the pictures struck a chord, especially the individual pictures of dear family members and friends, many lost in the mists of time. I found a small picture of my father I had taken of him in our backyard, one day when he had just gotten home from work, when I was 13, with my little Polaroid camera he had bought me when I was 12. He is smiling, holding a cigarette, looking confident and handsome in his nice herringbone coat and Kashmir scarf in the bright sky of a late autumn day. All those moves for me, from Belgium to Texas, first Dallas, then Fort Worth, then Austin, then California, then Washington State, and that small picture, among hundreds of pictures, survived. I gently put it with a framed picture of my son taken at our favorite seaside resort in Oregon nine years ago.
I found a picture of my youngest sister, at age 15, a picture taken in our backyard in Roeselare, Belgium, by a professional photographer. The picture shows her sweet and fragile and is all the more haunting, as she would commit suicide in her mid thirties, in the deep south of the US, in Georgia, where she was living with my parents at the time. In the picture she is wearing an almost gauze fine summer dress in colours of pale white and lavender, with flouncy short sleeves, making her look like a girl out of a 19th century picture book. It was heartbreaking to see her so vulnerable all these years later, as if her frame was already too frail to handle life even back then.
There were pictures of my brother, humorously flexing his bodybuilder muscles, as he was very fit as a college student. It was comforting to see these pictures, because a photograph is something you can hold, touch, when the person in the picture is someone dear to our memories and heart. There were precious pictures of our son as a baby and toddler, of my husband when we were first married, all so tender and precious to be seen again.
A friend dear to my heart recently let me know he would be sending some books my way. When we were friends in graduate school I was too shy to take a picture of him before he returned home, far away on the other side of the planet. I asked him if he could indulge me and include a small photograph of himself alongside the books. He pointed out with due pragmatism that pictures of himself at times appeared on his Website, and I agreed that was undeniably the case, but put forth my request saying that a physical photograph closes the distance in the mind and heart. As he is an important person in my creative endeavours and evolution, I want a picture I can frame and put on my desk or wall, next to the picture of my favorite aunt in Belgium, my longtime French girlfriend in Grenoble, my friend Shelia in Virginia, who had a profound impact on me spiritually, to make them present now, underlining these friendships have all lasted well over 30 years. I was glad my graduate school friend agreed to my sentimental request. A picture on a cell phone is just not quite the same. Some things are just better the old fashioned way, where you can touch the photograph, hold it, and make it part of your surroundings, so you are reminded how this person matters, truly and deeply, then, today, and tomorrow still, in the journey of our story and our life.