I Get It Now - Childhood Pictures

Hello Everyone,

There is an exquisite pleasure in visiting your in-laws for the first time and seeing old pictures of your partner. The nervous teen staring back at the camera. The outdated haircuts, the braces, the awkward school photo poses. It’s delicious.

But I see it differently now. Something that happens to you as you age is that you can look at the same pictures year after year and see different things. The pictures, of course, stay the same. It’s you that’s changed.

I take a lot of photos of the Munchkin. Like most people of her generation, you could just about make a flip book movie of her entire life if they were all printed out. Also, like most people of her generation, she’s starting to pose for pictures – smiling, standing up straight, facing the camera, etc. Those still look good, but some of my favourite pictures are those where she is awkward in position or expression. The awkward photos have a guilessness to them that, to me, reveals a part of their personality. Famous people can be in a million pictures, and they all look the same, because they have to keep their true selves separate. The smile is a mask.

It's tough for pictures to fully capture the sense of a moment or the essence of a person. The camera lies as often as not. When they have two ancient manuscripts of the same section of the Bible that differ in their wording, one of the ways they determine which is older is the one that makes the least sense. Errors and inconsistencies tended to get fixed or erased as the book got copied from monk to monk. The awkward one is the real one. Photos too have that quality.

That’s what I see in those older photos now. Not just a funny picture of me and my siblings or my partner at a younger age, but their innocence, their earnestness. I used to be embarrassed by how I looked in pictures as a spacey kid or awkward teenager, but now I see what a parent sees when they look at the pictures of their kid because, well, I’m a parent now too.

What I used to see only as funny or embarrassing, I now see as capturing a fleeting moment in their lives. As much as the kid seen running confidently or smiling to the camera is my kid, so is the one standing awkwardly because she doesn't quite yet know how to pose, holding a craft she just made with eyeballs askew or lines coloured over. The one who doesn't yet automatically smile when a phone is put in her face, doesn't try to contort her body to look a different way. That’s my kid too.

Wes

Photos

I don’t have any childhood photos to provide, but I do have some of the garden.

I'm hoping this the year that this bad boy is going to deliver on it's promise of delicious plums come fall.

It might look like a Sarlacc, but it's one of my favourite images of spring: rhubarb poking out of the ground.