OF GOLDFISH AND MEMORY

By MICHAEL PERKINS

AS WE ADVANCE IN AGE, OUR LIFELONG HABIT OF PHOTOGRAPHING EACH OTHER takes on a kind of mildly desperate urgency. Suddenly we realize that everything we see might be the last of something: the last birthday with Grandma: the last Christmas before the children move away: the last time we were all together “like this”. A wasted opportunity for a picture becomes a more egregious error. Oh, I missed it. We become acutely attuned to the fleeting nature of things than we ever could have as young people.

2023 mark my first holiday season without my mother. She lasted nearly ninety-one years, and her marriage to my father, who remains, marks its seventy-third anniversary as of this Thanksgiving Day. The image shown here, taken in 2017, is not the final picture I have of them together, but, over time, it has become my favorite. Over the space of two thirds of a century, literally thousands of pictures have been made of the two of them, almost all of them forward-facing, every one of them radiating the love and joy that made their lives a perennial miracle. But this one, with their backs turned to me, can make me cry as well as smile. And I cherish both reactions.

The composition is a pure accident, absolutely a thing of the moment. For years, they maintained the tiny fish pond just outside the back window of their dining area, struggling to keep it clean and safe from the elements as well as the predations of the occasional greedy heron. This meant that the simple act, especially in the winter months, of their looking out to see how “the babies” were doing, was a regular part of their daily routine. And so this is a snapshot of something very ordinary.

Or at least it began that way.

Now, it’s something deeper. Now, it’s the two of them, the Team Supreme, the Two Against The World, side-by-side, looking outward, looking, as one, for the Next Big Dream. I can’t see their faces, but I can clearly visualize their souls. The photograph taketh away and the photograph giveth.

In this cold Ohio November, my father, the last man standing, walks the halls of a home that is now merely a house, looking for his pal, his best girl, and finding only shadows and echoes. Amazingly, he learned enough about hope from her, over a lifetime, to keep going, keep looking for more fish that need caring for. And I go “fishing” for this picture for the solace I seek.

I know they are actually not separated at all, not really.

But, occasionally, I can sure use a reminder.