Photo a window into lost life (12/27/04)

I can’t stop thinking about that picture. It is just a simple black and white photograph that is pockmarked with brown age spots. It curls in my hand as if to protect itself from the harsh light of reality.

My mother gave it to me because she has its twin in a paper bag in her closet. The sack is filled to overflowing with photos of relatives long forgotten. This one has the name “Merl” written in pencil on the back.

The picture portrays a fashionably dressed young lady smiling into the camera. The dark-haired girl has the slender figure of youth. She stands straight and tall, holding her hat by her side. Her clothing suggests that is the late 1920’s. The background is unidentifiable.

She is my grandmother yet she is a stranger to me. The woman I knew as Grandma never wore clothes like that. Almost every dress I ever saw her wear was homemade from calico cloth.

She always used the same pattern. It had short sleeves and fit her like a sack. Although she preferred calico she varied the colors according to the season. The only store-bought dress I ever saw her wear was navy blue and was reserved for special occasions.

Yet here was proof that once upon a time she wore stylish, well-fitting clothes and looked, as my brother put it, like a “foxy lady.” She looked like someone who could dance until midnight or pilot an airplane alongside Amelia Earhart. All the possibilities of life were written in her posture and the expression on her face. She could do anything, and it showed.

I was also surprised at her shoes. My grandmother always wore sandals even in the dead of winter. In the photograph she has on a style known as Mary Janes.

She is wearing long white stockings or perhaps white hose. The grandmother I knew always had bare legs. It was only when the snow flew that she would put on any socks at all.

I stare at the photograph, willing it to tell me who this woman was. It is silent, of course.

I go in search of my albums filled with fading photos. I find a picture of an extremely overweight woman holding a baby. The baby is so tiny compared to the woman. Neither of them smiles. It is my grandmother holding my daughter.

I find another one of a disheveled woman. In one hand she has a cane and the other is holding my purse so the photographer can take a picture of me and my new husband.

She looks lost. I study this picture, looking for the girl in the faded black and white image that I got from my mother. I cannot find her.

I keep searching. I unearth one of the last pictures we took of my grandmother. Her snow white hair is sticking out at odd angles.

Her clothing hangs on her. I look in her eyes and see the torment of not being able to focus, to form the words she wants to say, to do the things she wants to do. I see a pitiful, little old lady prone to crying, not the big, strong woman of my memory.

What happened to the happy young girl in the photograph? What caused her to lose her hopes, her dreams, her smile? Was life so cruel to her that she lost the ability to turn up the corners of her mouth and be happy?

Who was this self-confident, contented girl who became my angry grandmother? I do not know.

I think of these things when I see grumpy old people with lines etched deeply into their weathered faces. I wonder what life has handed them to make their pain so evident in the stoop of their shoulders and the frowns they wear. I wonder why it is that some people go through life seemingly unscathed and others hurt so much that they lose the ability to feel simple joy. I wonder if they also have photographs of when they were young and carefree.

I wish I had known the girl in the picture. My grandmother died more than 10 years ago. I hope the afterlife has been kinder to her than real life evidently was. I hope that she has somehow learned to smile again.[[In-content Ad]]