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Photographic Ripples


Here I am looking very much like my father, holding a picture of my daughter who looks remarkably like I looked when I was about her age, 15 or 16. Does that mean that she resembles her grandfather? I think, in fact, that I have palm-sized black and whites of my father's mother shot sometime in the 1920s and, coming across one of them once not too many years ago, I thought, huh, my daughter looks like her great grandmother, the mother of my father. Audrey was wearing a hat in the picture and her head was on a provocative tilt. Unusual because the grandmother (my daughter's great grandmother) that I knew, the one I'm thinking of was far from exotic looking in my mind growing up. In fact she epitomized the hard working White Anglo Saxon Protestant woman in an apron that covered her upper torso, waist and thighs, wearing funny looking glasses, and with her hands up to their wrist in soap suds...


though, wait, that was like my grandfather, my father's father Mike, who always made us wash up to the elbows before a meal. Before prayer and a meal, after washing. So, I look away for a minute and then I glance back at the picture and I also see the face of my mother in my face, somewhere around the eyes. My mother's eyes are one larger than the other though she tells me she doesn't see that. And then I remember photographs of my mother in the early 1950s, and she's thin as a butter knife and wearing a belt no bigger round than a hand laid next to a hand, and there is the identical waist and frame walking around draped over the body of my daughter. 


Most likely her father is in there too, of course. When I first met my husband, before he was my husband, and on my mother's very first meeting she said "I want my grandchild to have that man's eyes". My husband's eyes are almonds of blue. But the kid's got my eyes which turn from hazel to olive. And these are the eyes of many of the women in my family. You place a photo of each of us, a body next to a body, and you zoom in on just the eyes, drop away the chin, the cheekbones, the forehead, and we are nearly interchangeable. Hunt women. Hands up to something. FIngers holding the windows of our children. Children holding forever onto our upper torsos as we hold them. Like the picture of a monkey I have always loved that resides forever in my memory on a red tippy cup with a picture of a monkey holding a red tippy cup with a picture of a monkey holding a red tippy cup with a picture of a monkey holding a red tippy cup. Smaller and smaller until the cup becomes your hand and you cup it and your family expands with the ripples.

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