PUT ME IN, COACH

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THE HEAVIEST LIFT FOR ANY PHOTOGRAPH of a loved one is when time removes the original player depicted in the image, and the picture itself must come off the bench and stand in for that vanished team member, forever after. It’s at a time of personal loss that the casual shots we snap in a careless instant become more valuable than any other commodity. The picnics, the graduations, the weddings, the days at the beach….all are converted in an instant from base metal to gold.

The author and his father, circa 1954.

This week, as my ninety-six-year-old father prepared for his final bow upon the stage, I spent a lot of time, as one does, poring over the photographic tracings of nearly a century of life. Of course, all these candids were only the top layers on my memories, as I still have the ability to place them all in deeper context, to match up the seen with the unseeable. I can’t decide, from minute to minute, whether it’s an exercise in comfort or agony, but I suspect it’s an alloy of the two. I can’t smile without crying and I can’t cry without smiling, and round and round we go.

When we flash a smile, throughout the years, for whoever happens to have just turned up with a camera, we aren’t posing for the ages. We aren’t trying to create an official version of ourselves to stand in for us after we are no longer around. Few of our portraits are formal or official. Beyond that, there is the random ravage of time, which determines which of the thousands of pictures of us will be lost, burned, stolen, or merely vanished, and which ones will survive to mark our passing. There is something horribly fateful in that knowledge. There is always the shot that oh, was taken right after I left the service, or ah, was right before we got married, etc., etc. that may be the one that’s forever vanished beneath the waves. The ones that got away, and all that.

Photographs, for being as recent in our human history as they are, have become our avatars, our “counterfeits”, as Shakespeare used to call cameo portraits. When the real player is tired or fallen, the fates, like some cosmic coach, reaches into the box of photos on the bench and sends in the substitute. It’ll never be enough. But it’s a very powerful little something, and sometime, it hits a grand slam.