Photographs

Among my failings I must include collecting. One of the things I collect are images, a somewhat random sampling of Mr. Eastman and Mr. Kodak*’s now dying art. I cannot throw out a picture, even the red faded ones of strangers I find tucked between the pages of books in the sale bin.

However, pictures specific to my own history I take more seriously. In one of the enormous drawers where I keep them is a folder somewhat boastfully marked “Lovers” in the firm printing of a long lost organizational moment. It’s full of pictures, although the “Is is” of their identity is probably open to debate.

I remember most of the names. This absurdly contributes to my self-satisfaction.

As I look through them, I meditate on what I know of them now. I know more than my general indifference justifies…there aren’t after all, so many people in the photos. On the other hand, it’s not the complete set.

This folder might, more accurately, be titled, “A few mistakes in my early life.” There’s the first High School boyfriend. He was on his second marriage, last I heard. Writes. There’s the poet and playwright, he has a little theatre in Vermont. There’s the outdoorsy bully. I don’t know where he is, thankfully. There’s the passionate affair across the Midwest. How did I never notice that sulky expression? That one is in Greenwich Village. There’s the optimistic couple. It’s impossible for me to imagine them moving forward in time, they were so rooted to their era.

To the errors of their era, one might say.

Here, though, is a photograph of three young people at the top of the world. At the top of the continent, at least, standing in the thin snow of the continental divide, above Estes Park.

I’m in the middle, looking happy, and slightly coy. I remember that day as though it were yesterday, which is to say, not nearly as accurately as I believe. Two of us were acclimated to the altitude by then, the third was a visitor, crashing with us as an endless stream of wandering hippy types did, following one of the affinity ant trails that led between friendly sources of tail and tofu. I honestly don’t know what the negotiation about tail was, in this case. I don’t believe I was involved, but it’s hard to say. Nothing but a sudden outcropping of good sense ever interrupted the constant general horniness that passed for political theory then, and good sense ran by biorhythmns, as much as anything else.

It was a lot too cold for my daring and mostly homemade outfit. Some of that smile is bravado. Probably the trip to the high country was spontaneous.

But the smiles on the three of us are genuine. It really is wonderful to be young and healthy, and looking out across miles of mountain top with at least enough money in your pocket to get you home. There we are, a portrait in gratitude.

The face on my left, he’s an apologist for a cult now. He looks fine on the news, although drastically more cleaned up and conventional than the daring young man who taught me trapeze in the old days. The one on the right is about five years sober, I believe, and very old looking now. He writes a depressing blog. I wish I could show him this picture, when he looked out across the hills so cheerfully, so innocently.

Have I changed since the picture? Not as much as I needed to, maybe. I still can be found occasionally hiking in a homemade outfit of more beauty than utility, and grateful to have enough gas in my car to get back indoors at the end of it.

Looking happy.
And slightly coy.

*There was never a Mr. Kodak, it's a made-up word.