This is a photograph of my mother's mother and father. Grandma died when I was young; I can only recall her as a stern (and sturdy) farm lady who yelled at me for running around in her little house. I remember her chastising me for not knowing how to tie my shoes and for needing her help in doing so. In my memory, she comes at me with the "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime" parable, and forces me to fumble with my laces until I can do it by myself. It is likely that this "teach a man to fish" dialogue has been retroactively inserted into the memory, but that is the way scene plays out in my mind. I remember it like it was yesterday, standing in their unpaved driveway, the midday Eastern Washington sun beating down, the muscular walnut tree and postage stamp yard off to the left, the rusty horseshoe marking the entrance to the small garage behind (filled with a museum of old farm tools), the pulse of sprinklers irrigating the surrounding corn fields, the buzz of dragonflies in the air. I'm sure this is romanticizing it; my cantankerous grandmother would probably have something to say about this kind of sentimentality.
The picture tells a different story, however. It is hard to believe that my grandmother and this handsome young woman in cute shoes are the same person.
I love this picture so much that a few years back I included a passage about it in "Baleen," a short story about an old man who transmogrifies into a right whale. Some of the details have been fudged, just like in my memory.
"In the picture Gramps and Grammy were standing up against a Twenties-model Ford, the kind with running boards below the doors. They looked so young that it startled him. Gramps was skinny and cocky, with a long nose and pointy jaw just like Kevin. His mouth was open in a laugh and the hat on his head was tilted at an angle, like a fashionable Scandanavian gangster.
"Grammy looked like she wasn’t even twenty years old. Her hair was dark and curly and longer than he'd ever seen before. She was strange and beautiful at the same time. She had her right foot on the running board and her left hand on Gramps’ leg, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"You could tell she thought she had a pretty good catch."
2 comments:
I love these photos--and how you situate them in both familial and critical terms. Where did you find them? That's something else I'm interested in. The people who collected and saved them. Why these photos? Where did they keep them?
Another wonderful photo--I like looking at pictures of my grandmother (now gone) when she was young. She was totally dishy. I love how directly your grandmother looks at the camera. Something a little uncanny about that.
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