Photographs On The Wall: My Family

Friends down here in Sarasota are forever getting on the plane, heading north to be with "the kids."  Other are in constant communication with them through texting.  My children and I pretty much leave each other alone except for the big occasions.  We couldn't stop talking and laughing together for four days, my daughters and I, when we went to Cape Breton in September for my granddaughter's wedding where we met up with my son, father of the bride, who's a pretty fierce talker as well, who has the added burden? joy? of looking like the spitting of me as I was in my fifties.  But most of the time I am a father alone with his photographs.  And they are wonderful ones.  Those on the wall bring them from their teenaged years into adulthood and middle age.  There is a delightful shot of my two boys setting off with the rest of us for our first neighborhood bar mitzvah ever, and at the time they had long hair to their shoulders and below.  There is a hysterical photo done in a photo booth of my second son, his wife, and their four progeny, crammed together and all in their best expressions.  I choke up whenever I look at it.  And wonderful shots posed formal portraits of each daughter in middle years with their delightful husbands, photos that capture the same formality and enduring love that one sees in those Victorian posed shots.  Then on one wall I have posed my older daughter on the cusp of adulthood, so beautiful and shy, and above her a photo of her aunt who had the same name and above her her great aunt, my favorite aunt, and my mother's best friend who was the one who first held that name in our family, and the resemblance is there to see from great aunt to great niece.  If this were not enough I have the girls setting off for a protest march in the seventies their packpacks loaded, I have the younger son holding his new born first baby looking entirely mystified.  And in a surround to all these there are my sister and my brother, and even my mother, and a wonderful shot of my father whom I never knew because he died so young looking into the camera dressed to go hunting,  My mother is a painted miniature of her when she was in her early twenties, my father in his hunting gear must have been mid forties since nearby is a formal photo taken on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, and he was killed in a car crash four days later.  And there am I about to be eighty five looking at all these youngsters.