Earlier today, I was going through an old photo album. I found it among my mother’s possessions, makeshift household items, and sitting in our garage. There, among the dusty boxes and antique fabric-covered furniture, were artifacts from a life lived for 96 years. Ever since her death, they have been collecting dust along with her memories. My mom kept over a hundred photo albums of pictures of family and friends, but this particular 3×5 color photo caught my eye right away. It was something in the background that made me stop and look again and again. In the foreground are two former girlfriends (today they would be referred to as BFFs, I guess), one I worked with at NBC decades ago when my life mattered on TV behind the scenes, the other I’d known since high school but had lost track of her. . We were barely twenty years old then. I was the photographer and I took this photo in the studio at Mom’s house, but I remember little of what we were doing just before and after the shutter click.
The photograph that stands out in this act of remembering is not the one in my hand, but the photographer within this photograph. Hanging on the wall just behind one of my best friends, who is holding a lit cigarette (everyone smoked in the 1970s), is a black-and-white portrait of another schoolmate. She was also probably in her early twenties when a professional took her, but she appears to be around sixteen in this pose of resting her cheek on her hand. I can’t really tell where she is in this picture within a picture, but her hair is long and she’s smiling. I haven’t seen any pictures of her in years.
This image started for me because this frail and childish BFF died a long time ago. This photograph also disappeared a long time ago, presumed dead as I don’t remember where he currently rests. Curiously, after his death, I began to write my epistolary novel Letters Between Us in fits and starts. The thought of losing my girlfriend with whom she shared much of my formative years with me left a huge hole in my heart at the time. Most of all, because I felt as if part of me, that childish, naive, silly, curious, giggly, lanky girl that she was, had died with her. As we got older, we discontinued our communication, which often happens to old friends, so when I found out about her passing, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was a mistake. He knew that she had been ill, on and off, for several years. Unfortunately, that illness eventually took her away from her loved ones. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.
His death caused a void in my life; she was an absence in my memory as was that part of my adolescence. To relive it, I wrote about those days in the early 1960s, those days of making peace not war, those days of burning your bra, those days of not leaving, and I felt like talking to my long lost friend. time again. The characters in my novel have much of the same passion that I had expressed in my youth, but they are in no way like me or my late best friend. Interestingly, though, while making Letters, I found myself feeling the same familiar feelings of rebellion that I had felt as a young hippy protesting the Vietnam War. Fast-forward some forty years: I am now left with this photograph of his photograph, reminding me of his presence on the road as I see a welcoming light leading me through a misty hallway, a light I have chosen to forget. haunts me
