by Paul Hina
they met. They had been spending so much time on the lake, and she was falling in love with what felt like a new world to her. She felt that she was seeing the world with new eyes, and she wanted to capture all she saw with this new vision. And once she got her hands on that camera—a Pentax something or other, a good camera—she always had it with her. It wasn't until around ten years ago that she finally relinquished her loyalty to film and switched to digital. So, until last year, they only had a couple hundred photos on their computer—all from the past decade. But after all of Lily's work to transfer all those old 3x5's and 4x6's to digital, they now have nearly eight thousand photos in their digital library.
And, lately, due mostly to Lily's daily reminders, John sits for a while—sometimes fifteen minutes, sometimes an hour or more—staring at a random slideshow of their old photos, watching the many documents of the life he and Maddie have made together.
He's not sure, though, that this daily trip into the past has had the intended effect. It seems to have done a pretty good job of attaching pictures to particular moments, but these moments weren't necessarily part of his memory to begin with. Many of these moments are from the camera's memory, a celluloid memory. Now, his recollections of Lily's old birthdays and dance recitals are made up almost entirely of photos from the slideshow instead of his personal memories.
But looking at the pictures has seemed to reassure Lily that his memory is still operating clearly, particularly when it comes to these big, life-marking events. But he knows the truth. The photos are only supplying him with placeholder memories, pieces of artificial memory that he may have never been privy to in the first place.
Another problem with the slideshow is that a single picture can send John down any number of memory holes, and he can too easily fade into those holes, searching inside himself for this or that memory. And there's always some tail attached to these mental chases, some fuzzy glimpse into the past that he can't catch or decipher. It's the same kind of feeling he used to get when there was a name on the tip of the tongue, but he couldn't quite grab hold of it. It's there. He knows it's there. He can feel it. He can even identify aspects of the thing, but the thing itself will just not come into clarity.
This often happens when he sees pictures of his parents or his brother.
They're all gone now. John's parents have been gone for decades. His dad died almost thirty years ago, and his mom passed just five years after him. And, even though it's only been three years since his brother died, John's forgotten as much about him as he has his parents.
So, more often than not, he'll see a picture of his mom or dad, and he'll try to place the moment in the proper context, to uncover the mysteries of the photograph. Where was the picture taken? What was going on when the picture was taken? Was it a birthday? An anniversary? A holiday? What year was it? When he sees a picture of his mom, he tries to jog his memory back to her playing the piano, tries to hear her singing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree." It was her favorite song, and he must've heard her play it a hundred times, but he can't quite grasp it. It's there. He knows it's there. He hears vague echoes of the piano, her voice. But he can't quite suss it from the fog.
And when he sees his dad, he tries to remember what it was like in the shop when his dad was working: the sounds of the place, the energy, the bustle of the man. He tries to remember the sounds of grunting and humming that his dad would make when he was working hard on a boat, focused and away from the rest of the world. John knows these memories are there, but he can't get the sounds right, can't get the smells of the shop to come back. He only remembers that that's the way things were. He remembers that there were sounds. There were smells. At least he still has knowledge that there were attributes to these missing memories. He just can't delve beneath the surface of his senses.
These surface memories—memories filled with holes—are all he's been able to keep of them. And this makes him very sad, and doesn't improve either his mood or his memory. It only reinforces what is gone, reminds him what is lost.
But he keeps watching the slideshow for Lily and Maddie's sake. After all, they don't all make him sad. He's learned to try and not focus on the pictures of his parents as much anymore. He tries to just smile and wait for the next picture to appear, wait for new memory holes to present themselves.
The landscape in and around their home acts as the backdrop in most of their photos: the lake, the hills, the interior and exterior of their house over the years. He likes to see how everything has changed over time, and to catch a glimpse of how things were back when he and Maddie were younger, when the future was full of uncertainties.
Then there are all those pictures of Lily growing up. Or the photos of their grandkids, Luke and Nathan. Those pictures inevitably make him proud, make him feel that he's made an impact, and give him confidence that he's brought people happiness. This gives him the sense that he won't be so easily forgotten.
Then, of course, there's the pictures of Maddie, which he could look at all day. Watching her grow and age in those photos has become one of the few pleasures he has these days. She's been so beautiful through every stage of her life. There's never been a moment when he wasn't completely in love with her, and never a moment when he wasn't absolutely certain that he married the right woman.
He looks over his shoulder and watches her rummage through the newspapers and magazines in their overflowing magazine rack. She sneaks a peek at him every now and then, and he's reasonably sure that she's felt the same way about him and their marriage.
They've truly had a happy life. There's a lot of luck that goes into a happy life: good health, financial security, good kids, a supportive family. But the luckiest thing of all was that they found each other.
And just in time too.
When the slideshow shifts to a picture of Maddie with her parents on the day of her college graduation, he pauses it. Maddie looks so young in the photo. Her whole life is in front of her, and, yet, her smile is tight. She's worried about the future that's coming at her. Of course, John remembers that this was the day that Bob, Maddie's father, told her that Henry had asked for his consent to marry Maddie, which was something people were still expected to do in those days. Of course, Bob had given Henry his permission and was positively beaming at the prospect. But Maddie looked as if she were staring into the barrel of a shotgun instead of the lens of a camera.
John stares at the picture, and specifically at his father-in-law. That man, a man John was never quite able to figure out, never forgave John for taking Maddie from Henry (as Bob saw it), or for the fact that John never asked his consent to marry Maddie. This was something that always bothered Bob. He felt that John's not asking for permission was a personal snub, and showed a lack of respect for Bob and the family. John knew this because on several occasions, usually on one of John and Maddie's wedding anniversaries, he would shake John's hand, say something to the effect of, 'you should've asked me for her hand,' and then, as if to twist the knife, he would add, 'that would've been the proper thing to do.' It was always apparent to John that Bob never believed that he was 'proper' enough for his little girl.
"What are you looking at?" Maddie asks. She's standing directly behind him now, tenderly stretching her hands over his shoulders.
"Your graduation picture."
"God, look at how young I was. I look terrified."
"Your dad looks happy though."
"Sure he does. In his mind, he had just married me off."
"Little did he know…"
"Little did any of us know," she says. "Why'd you stop at this picture?"
"I don't know. At first, I was struck by how beautiful you were."
"But sad."
"I noticed that too," he says, "but then I remembered that your dad had just told you that Henry wanted to marry you, and I started to think about Bob and I's relationship, how damaged it was in the beginning."
"It got better."
"It did. Mostly."
"No, John. He loved y
ou toward the end. He respected you every bit as much as he respected Henry. Even more so as time passed."
"You think?"
"I do," she said.
John restarts the slideshow and the pictures slowly move over the screen again. After a few minutes, Maddie kisses him on top of his head. He reaches up and grabs the hand she's placed on his shoulder and gives it a squeeze. Then she moves toward the kitchen.
And, though other pictures, other memories from other times, move by the screen, John's still stuck on that graduation picture, still thinking of Maddie's dad.
A few days after John and Maddie were engaged, the fact that Maddie wasn't marrying Henry, and the possibility that she had agreed to marry someone else, started to move through their small community. The whole town was shocked. Even in the boat shop, he would overhear stories about how Bob Winthrop's daughter, Madeline, had broken her engagement to the Hawthorne boy. Of course, as of their engagement, John hadn't known Maddie's last name. Things had moved so quickly between them, and they were still so drunk on each other, that he never thought to ask.
But once he heard the last name, Winthrop, he knew immediately who her dad was, and how difficult things were going to be for them. Bob Winthrop was one of two big names in local real estate development. The other one was Hank Hawthorne,
