Snapshot

My grandmother hid her photographs in the bottoms of drawers under heavy candlesticks and lace tablecloths, shooing us away if we found images of ancestors and had questions. My mother sighed heavily and asked why anyone would want to mull over the past. Where were we from? I don’t know, Siberia. Who was that man? Dead. Now stop asking questions. 

A single photograph of me and my dad exists only in my memory; the real image is missing, lost in the shuffle of moves. I’m on the ground, crawling, knees and hands dirty on a concrete sidewalk corner, gazing up. We are in a nondescript Midwestern town with low buildings and gray sky. He holds a lit cigarette, smiles with creased eyes hidden behind sunglasses, kicks a rock with a cheap brown leather shoe. 

Who took the photograph? It had to be my mother, all of 27, still blinded and bound by love to him. He was different from any of the boys she’d met in school. No doubt. She’d only met wannabe dentists, bespectacled teenagers with pocket protectors and handkerchiefs. Those were the boys her friends would all marry, but not her. The light-haired silent man, the one who doled out words as though he had a lifetime limit, which he did: he was hers. She saw herself as Katie, and he was her Hubble. Hubble had a cruel streak she didn’t yet know. He still kept things light then, always cracking a joke, a beer, a smile. Beyond the corners of the photograph, she stared at him adoringly as he nearly ashed his cigarette on his baby girl. He is very alive. It is 1979. 

The photograph is gone, but I keep the memory. It doesn’t have to haunt us – it’s both a token and a talisman. The dead men in the family can’t speak anymore for the women who pack up the past beneath linens and family heirlooms. The remembering, the story: it’s now ours.

Jamie Wagman is a Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and History at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana. Her creative nonfiction has been published in DASH Literary Journal, Newfound, the Adirondack Journal, and Burningword Literary Journal, among other places. 

A Song for Jamie