MetaGrrrl

In the picture, Grandma Susie is feeding me with a spoon. It’s a well-framed picture, her own left shoulder at the left edge of the picture, my face in the top half of the center line, framed by her arm holding the spoon, and behind me on the table a bowel of fruit. I’m looking over the spoon toward the camera. Grandma’s smile is visible around the side of her face. A lovely domestic scene.

What draws my eye, though, is not the tender moment, but trying to figure out what print that is on her shirt. Are those early typewriters with interspersed flowers? Or some sort of cash register?

That’s not to say I don’t love the sweet way Grandma is feeding baby me, but I don’t feel a gravitational pull toward toward the domestic bliss. Non-parenting was a good choice for me.

The next blog post in that month shows just how quickly people forget the scourges that once assaulted us. An immunization record I found says I got my first vaccine against Polio on that day.

Last in this month is a happy baby (me) at about 3 months old under a very nice baby blanket. Vague resemblance to me, but if the picture was unlabeled, I wouldn’t know it was. Still, a happy baby indeed.

Let’s go on to the next month. Visiting the other grandparents (my father’s), I’m much bigger, but still pretty floppy as humans go. I’m shown in a clever garment my mother made, basically what amounts to a sleeping bag with sleeves and hood. And, as my mother noted on Flickr when we were discussing the picture, “a zipper down the front for changes”. I could wiggle without kicking off what was keeping me warm. Pretty great for a pre-crawling person. I am still not to my present eye identifiably me.

A photo of my father looking at me as he props me up in his lap. I gaze up at him open mouthed, apparently fascinated. His expression in profile though is calm and neutral. Maybe all faces are subjects of intense interest to four month old babies. He sits on a bench, a photo on the wall behind him of his mother holding him as a baby. Above his head the photo of a past beloved dog and other family pictures are visible in the distance on the knotted pine wall.

When I think about the 21 year old men I’ve known throughout my life, I know that it would be extremely exceptional for one to be ready to make this life choice. I’m delighted to exist, don’t get me wrong! But I do wonder what the lives of those two very different people who came together to—surprise!—make me might have been if I hadn’t come along. My sympathy for those young folks is on the side of being able to have an ordinary college romance, learn from it and move on. Now I know my mother at least gained a great deal from the path of parenthood and I’m sure she wouldn’t have turned back the clock and caused me not to exist. My father felt enormous responsibility toward me, I believe, and genuinely liked me as a fellow human. But he wasn’t cut out for marriage and parenthood so young—few are!—and if he could somehow have known that I could be me and exist as a person while he side-stepped into a different time path, I think he might have. I do not think it would have made as much difference as he might have hoped, but perhaps the opportunity to engage more with his restlessness while young would have helped his journey in later years.

Then a photo of me in a dress made for my maternal grandfather’s christening in 1915. Right arm in motion, tongue sticking out a bit, probably kicking under the long white dress. A perfectly good baby. And many copies of this picture were passed around in the family. I came upon three and my uncle gave me a scan of the copy he had.

Another photo, perhaps from the same day, in a different little white dress, this one more gauzy, with silky ribbons, echoed in the cuffs of my socks. Very fancy outfits for photo day. I continue to wiggle happily. I look a bit Japanese in this photo. One of my eyes still retains more epicanthal fold than the other.

The next photo—three copies of it—has me in my little zipper-front sleeping bag outfit looking positively triumphant about being held up in a sitting position (by Grandma, I think, judging by the watch).

Naked (but mostly concealed by my mother’s arm) baby me looks at the camera as I’m lifted onto a towel after a bath in a big kitchen sink. There’s a toaster behind me.

A slightly eerie picture of me, possibly after bath with wet hair, laying on a plaid cloth, stuffed animal just slipping out the left side of the picture as I make claws with my hands.

The next picture looks more to me like a baby picture of my childhood friend Rick than of me. Grandma Susie holds me on her lap smiling. She’s wearing a flannel nightgown or housedress with lace around the flat collar. She is smiling and looking down to see my reaction as the photographer gets my attention. I’m a chubby-cheeked, somewhat sleepy looking baby here.

Still I don’t really see myself in these four-month-old baby faces. Well, maybe a little glimmer in the one where I’m being lifted. Something about the shape of the eye. Dinah just beginning to come through.

In the oldest post I created in my retroblogging on this site, the photo shows half a century ago a young (so young) wedding couple marching up the aisle of a church after their ceremony.

Both are barely out of their teens, about halfway through their 20th years. She is a classic, picture-perfect bride. The gauzy veil of childhood flipped back after that first kiss as a wife. Her delicate neck and collarbones in this setting not the gangly body of a teen kid, but a young woman’s beauty. The yards of white fabric of her gown requiring her to hold the skirt up with one hand, as the other, wedding ring on her finger, loops through my grinning father’s arm. The raised hem reveals the little white shoes. My father is dressed in a dark suit—the photo is black and white, so whether it is black or very dark is uncertain—with a small, precise bow tie and a light fluffy boutonniere. Formalwear worn with style. (And I think of this in contrast to the uniform of his later life, baseball hats, t-shirts, wood-stain-speckled jeans.) His smile glows. His hands are graceful. The picture-perfect groom.

It is a moment capturing having Done It Right.

I am in this picture, though you cannot see me. And that’s another part of doing it right; the ticking clock of my mother’s pregnancy. December wedding, July baby. The nick of time.

Around them are the beautiful lines of the church I knew from all my visits to my mother’s parents. That sweetly elegant little central valley Methodist church with its soaring arches. The heavy wooden pews, built to withstand a century of use. The thick padded carpets on the aisles. The choir loft above the entry so that the voices could emerge high above and behind you as you faced the altar.

I remember the shuffling of feet, the coughing, before and between the parts of the Sunday service. My child feet not reaching the floor. My wise and whimsical grandfather perhaps sliding me a couple 3″x5″ cards from his breast pocket and a little pencil from beside the offering envelopes in the pew-back holders. The music. The words of ritual. The simple, sweeping togetherness of the Doxology.

I do not recall ever believing in God, even as a child. But I dearly love many who do, and the lessons they shared with me both formally in church services and casually in daily life have been essential to my moral foundation. Do as you would be done by. Care for those who need. Work for peace. Recognize our shared humanity even in faces most different from your own. Do not hoard your blessings, but multiply them by letting them flow forth from you.

That sweet little church remains dear in my memories. Though I confess, part of its dearness is the exhilarating freedom I had in exploring it on non-service days as my grandparents performed various supportive tasks. Playing in the Sunday School rooms without any other person around. Finding all the doors between its various rooms upstairs and down in its U-shape, of which the church-proper was only one arm. Playing behind the closed curtain or out in the open, conditions depending, of the raised stage at the end of the big Community Hall. Running the Hall’s length to its big kitchen to check on whatever my grandparents and other volunteers were doing there. It was a thoroughly grand place to be an adventurous little kid.

There are other pictures in this oldest blog post. My mother in classic pose, veil down, bouquet in hands, skirts fluffed and arranged to maximum circumference. Her face is like a merged photo of a child and an adult. Lipstick lips and a strong jaw smiling below a button nose and wide eyes.

The two of them together. Happy and excited, but with some anxiety in their faces. The fingertips of my father’s left hand tucking into the front of his jacket as though he might have just checked his fly. Just in case. I see little of my grandmother in my mother’s face in this picture, but my father wears much of his own father’s look. That shadow was a hard one for him to grow up in; he dreaded turning into his father, and I wonder if the fear of that hindered him finding his own path. Worry that bogged him down so much it became self-fulfilling in some ways.

A photo of them by the cake—unflattering of my father, looking a bit like a mannequin as the camera catches him awkwardly; my mother, gracious, beautiful, perhaps slightly terrified. There is a plate of what I think are three rows of cookies—red, white, green—representing not Mexico or Italy but Christmastime.

The last has them surveying the piles of wrapped presents after a costume change which puts my father in a brown suit and a narrow blue tie and my mother in a chic pink skirt and tall collared jacket.

Here my brain sings “in my copy of a copy of a copy of Dior”, thanks to my mother’s commendable habit of playing good musicals on LP around our house when I was a child.

So there they are, the newly married couple, dressed to the nines, the Community Hall dimly visible behind them, stage curtains open. Here it begins. A direct line from a point below the hem of that perfect little jacket top of my mother’s dress suit to a child singing and telling stories to herself on that stage in an empty room years later.

And perhaps a straight line too, from a musical a couple years later, to my mother deciding a bit over half a decade later there’s gotta be something better than this and getting up getting out and living it.

Close the door then on the scene, with love and appreciation, and change that post to private. Eyes to the present happiness, hearts full.