family portraits.

this is for Jessica.
i loved her post on family portraits and wanted to share mine.
left to right: my father and his cat Prince (who went into the road and was struck by a car the week after my dad died); Sam's grandmother, and the grandfather he never met; me and my dog Mia, kissing on the beach; my best friend Melissa from when we were seventeen mucking around at Wal-mart having an impromptu photoshoot. some people will say it's narcissistic to have portraits of yourself in your bedroom but i've never thought that. i keep myself there because it was such a spontaneous and special moment i wanted to remember it. when me and Mia were young and happy on the beach together and she wanted to kiss me (which she practically never ever does. some people probably think that's sick anyway..) and also, Sam took it.
i think a still photograph (or moving image all the better) is the closest you can come to a memory outside of your mind, so you keep them close like people whose faces you don't want to forget.
i keep Sam's nanny there because she was my friend and i want to remember her young and jaunty, like in this photograph, like if she walked she would walk with a swagger. very Katherine Hepburn. when i met her she was in her 80's and didn't swagger, but she had good bones and and good posture and still had a great deal of the spunk of the girl you see here. i met her before i met Sam. i think this photo is when Sam's grampa was going to war. he came back too, but he'd been starved in a PoW camp and was never the same. his nickname in the camp was Bones from Taranaki. someone sketched him. he looks like this but the lollipop version, in the sketch his head's way too big for his shrunken stripy pyjama clad body. he died long before i met Sam's nanny.
anyway, Nanny would sneak over from where she lived next door with Sam's aunt, her daughter, Rose. she would sneak round to Sam's cousin Leah's house and Leah would roll her a cigarette. she wasn't allowed to smoke because of her heart. she would have half of her cigarette over a cup of tea with us and she would save half and smoke it later in the bamboo where she thought Rose didn't see her. i was calling her Nanny before i even knew i would be with her grandson...
she was very embarrassed when she started losing her memory. she'd left the bath running and running, and cooked the plastic kettle on the stove. she would talk in a very apologetic but humorously matter of fact way about it to us. and i'd tell her i was only twenty and couldn't keep track of which day of the week it was but she knew i placating her. we all knew it was more serious than that. it progressed very quickly. they had to put her in a home. it was too much for anyone. in the home she deteriorated even more rapidly and none of us liked visiting her. she would sit unconscious in a chair and let out these strangled screams. they at the home said she didn't know she was doing it, that it was involuntary. once when we were visiting though, she stopped screaming, opened her watery blue eyes, looked right at me and said, 'who's this beautiful girl?'
i remember that as clearly as a photograph.
she loved me, we had such brilliant talks. i loved her.
memory is so fallible but photographs are not.
maybe the reason for photographs is people inconveniently change when we don't want them to, so we freeze them for our own preservation?
god bless all the frozen people in the family portraits we keep.