Family Pictures

No one in my family spoke much about family.

My mother, an only child, and my daddy, one of 10, were both reticent about their childhoods and the subject of who they were before marrying never came up. I knew the basic details - that both had been in the military, that for one brief summer my mother had worked in a well known department store and that my daddy had been a salesman. I knew where my mother had gone to high school, that my daddy had played in an army band. It was the things I didn't know - the things that never came up - that began to interest me, especially when I realized how much everyone else seemed to know about their families. How had they met? Where were they married? Did they have a long or short courtship, a honeymoon? Did they struggle to make ends meet or have the same dreams? I didn't know what day of the week I was born, where my brothers were born, how my daddy had come to work for my grandfather, what my numerous aunts and uncles did for a living. Had my grandmothers ever met? How old was my daddy when his own daddy died? How did the family business come to be a funeral home? I knew more about the histories of friends and their families than I did my own and stranger still, knowing so little didn't seem the least bit odd. We weren't a chatty or a forthcoming family and though there were one or two old photograph albums with grainy old black and white snapshots pasted to black paper, they didn't tell much of a story and I had no idea who might have been behind the camera. My maternal grandmother had a handful of similar albums but they were mostly faded 3x3's from an instant camera and mostly scenic shots graced with very few people. We weren't much for memories either, I concluded, and later on I was to idly wonder if my own interest in photography might not have been born, in part, from this lack of a visual record keeping.

There are always only two kinds of people in this world, my grandmother liked to tell me, Only we define them in different context. There are dog lovers and cat lovers, savers and spenders, truth tellers and liars, accountants and artists, lovers of war and peace seekers. There are families who treasure where they come from and others who would rather never know. Distill it down to its most common element and it makes no matter, she warned me,
How we come to be isn't as important as the fact that we are.

Arguing with Nana was always a futile process but on this occasion, though I didn't dare suggest it, I thought she might have been wrong. A part of me, the part that writes stories and takes pictures and remembers, still does.