Another Summer Races Past

The Boston Herald

September 3, 1993

Like all seasons, another summer races past

I stole the idea from my friend Beth. She's a photographer and has had a picture wall in her house for as long as I've known her. It's not a formal wall where each photograph is framed and hung, then dramatized with lights, but a wall of corkboard where pictures are casually pinned.

My wall is in the family room, half a wall really, filled with at least 100 pictures, which I change about once a year. I don't take down the old pictures to replace them with new. The wall isn't like a photo album; the pictures are not chronological. They're a collage of our lives, my family's, our friends'. Rosemary at four is only inches away from Rosemary at 40; her mother and father are on the wall, too, as well as her husband and sons. Time here is interlaced, random moments preserved.

I don't sit and look at the wall very often, though other people do, friends and guests, my children's friends. For me it's like most other household things; it blends into the background. It's always there so I tend not to notice it.

But the other day, my daughter asked me to sit down and talk to her for a while, which I did, and as we talked our eyes drifted to the wall, mine to a picture of her brother, father, and godfather, taken nearly nine years ago.

In it, the three of them are smiling, standing in the kitchen, all holding before them identical blue Wilson golf bags. The picture was taken at Christmas. I remember it. I also remember that it was a coincidence that all had received the same gift. But I don't remember who bought the bags for whom, and neither does my daughter.

My son is wearing a Georgia Fun Run T-shirt in the picture, which I still wear to the gym. The boy in the T-shirt is now a man living in another state. The shirt is the same, but the child is gone. I get up to study the picture more closely, trying to remember what came before and after the shot, trying to hear voices in the next room.

"Do you remember anything about that day?" I ask my daughter. She shakes her head no as she stares at the picture, too.

Next to that photo is a shot of my mother, younger than I am now. She stands on the back steps of the house in which I grew up, in a dress I helped pick out, short and black with a hot-pink bow. It is summer - I can tell that by the screen in the door, by my mother's coatless pose. But I don't remember which summer, or where we shopped for the dress, or who took the picture. The moment exists all by itself, without a beginning or end, just an ordinary second captured on celluloid and hung on a wall.

Most of the pictures on the wall are ordinary. Molly is all over the place - as a puppy; as a bigger puppy with a broken leg and scraped nose; as an adolescent chewing a bone; as she is now, a huge, black thing sprawled on the couch. There's my mother and father-in-law, nearly half a century ago, leaning toward one another at a table, so openly in love; my father-in-law as a band leader, "Bob Beckham and his Blues Chasers;" my father with his mother, in the early 1950s in another kitchen; my father in the army; as a police sergeant.

"Look at Teddy, Mom. Can you believe how white he used to be?" He was white when the child holding him was two. Now the child is 16; Teddy is gray and worn from love.

We laugh as we look at all the vacation pictures. Lake Powell - the trip from Hell, though you'd never believe it from the smiling family posed under Rainbow Bridge. There we are in Glasgow, Scotland, with Grandma at her first home. "Remember how Robbie's sneakers smelled? Remember how we made him put his feet out the window when he was in the car?" There's no picture of it, but the memory is clear. There are so many pictures of us at Black Point Inn that if I removed them from the wall and stacked them chronologically, I could actually watch my children grow.

"It goes by so fast, doesn't it, Mom?" my daughter says. That's what we were talking about before we got sidetracked by the pictures. That's why she called me into the family room. To lament the passing of another summer. To wonder aloud where July and August had gone.

The wall is proof that it's not just summer that speeds by, but all the months, one right after the other, years turning into decades, turning into lifetimes, right before our eyes