Get it all in there

As I remember it, right after my mom and dad were married, her parents gifted them with a subscription to National Geographic. As of this writing, each new issue is still delivered to my mom’s house, where there’s a bookcase set aside for the whole run, nearly sixty years later. In elementary school, I would go through them page by page the day they arrived. What I remember most vividly from this regular practice is a photo essay featuring the first ever pictures of the chambered nautilus in its natural habitat. Whether they were actually the first ever pictures or not, it was the first I’d seen them. Their symmetry was too perfect to be natural. They were like living math, sheathed in ivory, striped in gold.

Next time I’m out that way, I might see if I can find that issue somewhere in the early 1970s section of the bookcase, and check out how well what I remember holds up to what I saw. Or maybe I won’t. I often find that looking at old photographs does the opposite of bringing me back to the moments they ostensibly capture. Instead, they emphasize the remove between then and now. Besides, what’s most important about my discovery of the chambered nautilus isn’t the exact pictures in the magazine. It is sitting cross legged on the oval braided wool carpet, the surprise of each page turn, the tube tv with a set top antenna sitting above a junk drawer filled with stray pens and card decks as my dad, wearing a plaid short sleeved button down, knee length shorts, and sandals, drinking RC Cola and smoking Lucky Strikes, watches a football game with the sound off and a transistor radio on beside him because he can’t stand the voice of Curt Gowdy and because the radio play by play is always better anyway. The afghan my mom made tossed over the couch to cover the spots worn through on its arms, the bookshelves made with bare boards stacked on white bricks. Unpruned plants wandering over ledges and windowsills. The dust motes showing up in the angled light beams shining through the glass pane of the front screen door.

Did all of that happen on the same day? Could it have been captured in a polaroid? The most interesting thing about old photos is the everything else they miss.

60”x36”
acrylic on canvas
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