Pictures

Even now, when they’re both dead, a truth annoyingly remains: searching for Papa inevitably means running into Nana. The shopping bag of memories has a really beautiful chalk drawing of Papa, a profile done at the World’s Fair in San Francisco. In her scrawling script, Nana’s written “Buck” and “1939” across the middle of the drawing. Not on the back. Not discretely at the bottom. Right across the middle of the drawing. What, was she afraid she’d mistake it for her OTHER husband at that OTHER World’s Fair in San Francisco? She seems to have written on just about everything; but some of her scrawls were scrawls of pride. Written across the cardboard that holds the 2500 day sick leave pin, she’s written: “Actually, it was over 2800 days. They gave him credit for another year of service!”

I pull out all these pins and medals and arrange them on the table. The pictures I can scan, but I need to record these other things digitally before everything goes back to my mom. I find myself fiddling, arranging, moving, shuffling, clicking, trying to get them all neatly captured in the pixels of my digital camera. And then, horror of all horrors, Nana is right there again. I’ve run into her again. And this time it’s my fault.

Nana and Papa came to Oregon from California for my high school graduation. In fact, they stayed with us for the last week of school and all the festivities. I came home from school one of those last days, walked in my room…and the evidence of her invasion was right out in the open. On my bed and on the floor were speech trophies, certificates, plaques, baseball awards, just about every accolade I’d ever received, gathered in piles in my room. She had gone through my closet, under my bed, through all my drawers, and collected every little award I had ever gotten. She found stuff I’d forgotten I had. My grandmother had gone through my stuff in my room without ever even asking a thing! I about blew every gasket in my head, and ran out of the room to unload on my mom.

Turns out, Nana just wanted a record of all the little pats on the back I’d gotten, and hadn’t even given a second thought to the idea of privacy. She’d arranged them all on the table and taken half a roll of pictures, and, as proof that she had no concept of how horrified her grandson would be, didn’t even bother trying to cover her tracks. She just left the stuff piled in my room.

And here I am, decades later, taking pictures of Papa’s pins. It’s just exactly what she would do. Here I am, searching for Papa, trying to find the ways I might be like this man I admire, and instead, I’m doing exactly what Nana would do. I’m doing what she DID do, doing what I got so furious about years and years ago. Isn’t that just the way life is?

  ¶ 11:24 PM