Reclamation

Long after my parents were gone, my sister and I were sitting at her kitchen table poring through a shoe box of old family photographs. Most were faded four-by-fives, some with scalloped edges and creased corners, and others were faded beyond recognition. I brushed some aside, removed two photos and placed them on the table. They were ancient photos of my mother and father taken from the distant past. A date hastily scribbled on the back of one photo was unreadable. But the writing on the other photo was clear: Union Beach, 1946.

They are sitting in the sand. My father is bare-chested and lean, and his face deeply tanned. My mother is in a risqué two-piece bathing suit that’s a bit scandalous for it’s time. She is gazing at him adoringly, a rich smile on her lips. Beyond them a pier juts into the water, the waves splitting against the long thin stilts. I can almost taste the crisp Atlantic salt in the air, and hear the raucous laugh of the gulls.

In the second photograph, they sit on a bench on the boardwalk. A simple woolen coat is drawn over her shoulders, the sleeves of it knotted loosely around her neck. My father wears a loose-fitting, waist-length jacket reminiscent of James Dean. Its lapels as wide as the wings of a gull. His other arm is hung jauntily upon his left knee. The camera caught him tossing his head in the middle of a smile.

*

While those smiling pictures faded in a shoebox somewhere, my father took to alcohol. His rage and anger were too often aimed at me. He was taken by cancer at the age of forty-eight, a hollow man, a dead drunk in a hospital bed that I’d never seen. He had never allowed me into the room.

*

My own path along the alcoholic trail was worse  than his. My track had been peppered with drugs and other addictions, a few bouts of homelessness, and cold nights living in the back seat of my car. I became a blackout drinker, and never knew where I’d wake up, nor with home.

One morning I felt myself dying inside, and knew I would not last another day. I made a phone call, hoping it would not be my last. The call was answered, and I stopped. I was one of the lucky ones.

*

In the therapist’s office, and in workshops and retreats, I looked deeply into the bottomless pit that we call the past. I found his face down there. I howled at him, pounded at him with rubber bats and shouted at the ways I’d been scarred. When I knew it was safe, when I knew I had survived, I crawled out of the box I’d been in forty-five years. It should never have happened to us. Neither of us. It took years to put the pieces together, and sometimes I found that there were good times as well as the bad.

*

I forgave, and a great weight was lifted. Tears were shed, but they were no longer tears of pain. It took a few more years before I was well enough to forgive.

And longer still before I asked forgiveness.

*

I’ve never hung a family picture on a wall. When I found the two small photos  in the shoebox in my sister’s kitchen years ago, I tucked them into an envelope, and put them into a drawer somewhere. Years later I came across them, and scanned them into my new computer for the hell of it. I stared at them on the screen. I took out a dust mark here and there. Erased a scratch. I spent hours retouching them.

They are in frames now on a shelf. For days I was drawn to them. Each night before I turned out the light, I took the photos down and studied them. Even after a year or two I still pick them up. I guess that’s what pictures are for.

As I stare at their images, I feel them smiling at me—no, not at me, but at the idea of  me. When I see them on my shelf now I know that they never left. It was I who’d returned.

*