They’re All Smiling in the Photograph on the Wall

Many families have a few of these, I’m guessing.

Ours were often at the beach and in black and white with crinkled edges, because this was the 1950s, long before iphones and the non-stop photo diaries of our every interaction. And in the best of these photographs, our adolescent selves are posed together with one or both parents and the occasional “other person” I no longer remember (a great aunt or great uncle? A summer friend?). We’re all haphazard, all beach-exhausted, all a little sunburned, all very happy...and smiling. 

They’re wonderful, slightly blurry souvenirs of life before the stuff happens, when we’re still a tribe and the most important question of the day is “Hot dog or burger?”

It’s nice to revisit these images now and then, to remember, not in a maudlin or saccharine way, but in an “Aren’t they cute?” and “Yes, that happened.” kind of way. It’s these images that shape our lives, just as much as the trials and tribulations – these moments of innocence and possibility, captured forever, though sometimes forgotten in the shuffle. It’s good to take a look occasionally, to smile back at the people in the photos, extend a mental embrace and say, “Thanks for the wonderful day.” 

“Do not cry because they are past! Smile, because they once were!”

– Ludwig Jacobowski