Blue & Yellow Post

About Dad November 9, 2008

Posted by Liz Mead in : Matters Blue , trackback

We had a reunion yesterday. It was also Dad’s anniversary.

My brother gave us a gift of photos – scanned from a box of old slides he’d collected from the family home. Most of the slides, he reported, were mouldy and useless, but he had managed to salvage a collection that he was able to digitalise.

My brother is one of the kindest people you could meet. Unlike me, his older sister whose response to life is sharp (alas more acerbic than insightful), Chris has a gentle spirit that doubles as a spiritual balm. Don’t get me wrong, he’s no saint – he’s a soldier and a guardian of memories.

The photos are rich and loaded with such balm. As he showed us the show, from his laptop, amidst the glare of an overdue sunny day, we caught a glimpse of a past.

Some images were in shadow with only a hint to their identity – was that Marie? No that’s Gel – see on the left, what was her name? Others were so fragile and ethereal as if painted on rice paper, torn at the edges and only just able to hold their colour. And some, as if painted on a still wet canvas, pulsated redolent and vibrant, transporting us immediately to that shared place in time.

A time shared between us as an immediate family but also shared across our extended family of cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. So there we were gathered around a laptop in a sunny park on a picnic 40 years after most of the photos were taken.

The reunion was organised this year, 2 years after our inaugural one, by my cousin, also called Chris, an equally heart-centred person to my brother. She is mid way in a larger family, and the same age as my older sister. There was always a cousin who was the same age as someone else.

There were shared birthday parties, Christmas parties, picnics, and religious rites of passage. And there were shared and common Grandparents who were central to the concept of family; they were formidable, immovable and almost sacred in our collective identity.

Dad had clearly started photographing after the death of his wife, for we couldn’t find any photos our Mother. I can relate to his strategy – capture everything you see, try to figure out what it is you’re seeing and then figure out whether you want to be a part of it.

I’m glad he did. I’m glad he thought we were important enough to photograph. I’m glad he came back from the abyss that goes hand in hand with death, an abyss so beguiling so tempting you want to fall headlong into it. I’m glad he wanted to come back to us.

My brother is like my dad. They look like each other – so says my cousing Brian and he should know he’s a great observer of life and people. I agree with Brian. And I’ll go one step further and say my brother is like my dad in intention and drive. Attending to the bones he trawled through a record of life – our life – and brought back the pearl of great price. A testament to love.

I am profoundly grateful to you darling bro. I love you.

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