Best of times

He was going through his photo albums looking for a particular picture, a faded black-and-white photograph of him and his kindergarten class. He remembers his kindergarten teacher would have been to the right of the class, a rotund huggable Chinese everybody’s-older-sister type. This would have been the beginning of 1960. The class would graduate from high school in 1972. He remembers how she once saved his life by freeing his penis from the gripping bite of his zipper. They were all just children then.

He has yet to find the picture. But now he finds out that before he succeeds he must have to pore through hundreds of pictures, some loose, some inside albums. This is going to be hard work made much harder by the required remembrance of memories such as only a photograph can bring. Here, the photograph of his own kids when they were still babies. How innocent the oldest one was? Oh, he used to smile this way?

And then he is resting his head on his lap while he reads the papers. The picture would have been taken by the child’s mother. The camera might have been his old Minolta. Gone now along with most of his old books and old photographic prints, victims of termites, rain, time. The Minolta was always there. His students used it at will. But he is absent from most of the pictures because he would have been behind the lens, his right index finger resting on the button waiting for the right moment, whatever that was.

He hates and loves it. It bothers him, this old preoccupation with the past and memories contained inside a small frame containing only a distribution of dyes. They are so, what’s the word, vulnerable. They make you vulnerable as well. Memories in the form of thoughts and words inside one’s head are a bit much better for their flexibility, their deniability.

A photograph, on the other hand, especially an old print-photograph, is a fixed thing while it survives. It carries its age with it suggesting a world not even contained in the photographs themselves. Most of the pictures are of young people smiling and laughing for the camera. The world itself is only contained in random edges, a tree now gone, the entrance to the basement classrooms, etc. The pictures contain the world and a time gone by.

He lingers on a particular album. It begins with a funeral, his wife’s grandparent. Just a few pictures of it. He flips forward and finds pictures of his wife’s class.

There, a picture of Manny in chic Rayban sunglasses. There, Eleanore, Dindin, Ricky, Sandra, who passed away recently. The page could not, of course, contain the names of everyone. But Jovy is here. He is in England now. Like him, he was their teacher. He looks not much older or wiser than the others in the picture.

Another picture shows everyone misbehaving as usual. He remembers a lot of that. Johnny holds a bucket full of beer and ice. Another picture, possibly from the same event shows them covered in paint and laughing as if they were all quite literally drunk. They were. This drunken state was exactly appropriate for the time for losing one’s innocence. Innocenses! There should be such a word. For all who are here would lose it individually, each loss being both sacred and profane. Each loss being always private.

And so it was with him. He does not wonder if he married for love. The pictures contain how the photographer feels about the subject. She is always beautiful in all of them. But he wonders if he married just her and not all them, all the people pictured here, disparate young students enjoying what seems immediately from the pictures the best of times. Didn’t he really just want to take these times forward with him into the future? The photographs make him want to ask.

There are at least two photographs of him that stand out because he looks beautiful there. He thinks this beauty is not intrinsic or even deserved. It derives also from the fact the “she” who took the pictures  loved him as well, loved him even then when they were not yet married. In one, he is astride his Honda motorcycle still blue in color at that time. He would rebuild it decades after this and then color it red.

How beautiful, young-beautiful, they all once looked. He wonders: Did he trade all these for all that he would become? Did he betray all these, what he once was, for what he is now? He thinks not. Now! These times, these are the best times though the photographs speak of a grand and joyful time. He looks out the window and espies how his cat has walked too far out into a ledge too narrow for him to turn around without falling. To escape, the cat makes its way by retracing every step backwards, tail end first. He laughs. Stupid cat!