Rose-colored Lens

In my retirement, I finally got around to doing it. I stacked the uneven wedges of photo albums, binding left, binding right, so the stacks wouldn't fall. Epson V600 Photo scanner, you are my archivist now, days, weeks, months of taking each photo out of its sleeve, positioning it just so, tinkering with the contrast, saturation, and hues. Bequeathing to them 0s and 1s before the paper yellows them into only 0s.

Album "Mom Before Dad," 120 photos of a baby, little girl, posing or not, happy or not, in the mood for a snapshot or not, nevertheless, alive, her life documented. But I live it. I wasn't there, but I can be with her. Paul Simon sang, "I have a photograph. Preserve your memories--they're all that's left you." Even though they're her memories, I am with her throughout this photo album. I am more than peeking in. Since we became one, 37 years ago, we're off the number line, off the time line. I am there as she passes from girlhood to pubescence to adolescent coquette. Fun with her friends. I'm having a ball being there. Didn't they feel my presence? I am not just observing, I am visiting.

Album "Dad Before Mom," 89 photos of mostly professional poses. Me as a baby, me as a serious young man who gave the photographer fits although one couldn't tell by the little gentleman in the picture. Black and white in a black and white world. Looks like "olden times." How can that be when it was me? Like when that teenager in the parking lot told me, "Go to hell, old man!" Me? Old man? When did that happen? Photos of my family, Mom and Dad and us little shitlings, then those back a generation. Or two. Old emulsion, silver long gone. No smiles. Dressed impeccably. Every hair in place. Stares that beam straight out to me. All dead. Back then, there would only be one or three photos of someone. Now folks have thousands and thousands, with duck faces and peace signs and an outstretched arm as the vantage point of origin. Me on a bike--a big deal at the time. Me crying in the bedroom, courtesy of my Dad who took it just so that I could process the Polaroid according to a protocol that my brother wouldn't let me do minutes earlier. Set it up with a wipe, seal it with a wipe, let it dry. Photos within minutes--we thought we were living in the future then. But it was the past. My past. High school poses. Prom femmes pro temps. Girlfriends who lasted longer. Even some who met the parents. My first car, rigged with an 8-track, then a cassette player: real stereo...in a car! The girls would certainly go crazy.

Album "Wedding." That evening, on the plane to Acapulco, realizing that for the first time in my life I was truly happy. I had no idea. I liked the way it felt. Human. Earlier that day, the family poses, no less stiff than those on the old emulsion portraits. Just in color, this time. Wipe away the color and they're no different from the grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents.

Album "Honeymoon." What the Wedding Album was really hiding behind the starch poses and generational tableaus. Poolside--casual innocence of dedicated monogamy. Quotidian sex. Anytime. The gift of expressing love physically. Every honeymoon shot, bikinis and bathing suits, underscored the fact that we had been without them moments earlier. That smirk on my face. That smile on hers. So beautiful. Lean, smooth, nubile, and willing. Sex is a beautiful surrender. No wonder it's best with unconditional love. I think of her now as she sleeps one wall away.

Next the albums by the year. The 80s, the 90s, the 21st Century. First born, second born, and on and on. Parties with the children; parties without the children. Vacations, eschewing the predictable shots of landmarks in lieu of capturing only those with life going on, framed for viewing later. The growth curves within 35 mm, and the school years, their prom dates, perhaps even one with crying in the bedroom over an insensitive sibling slight. Reliving my life by living with them in these moments. Didn't they feel my presence then? Not from my presence...then, but my looking in, now? Now duplicate photos--mine, yes, but theirs, too, in their own stack of albums on the shelves in their own homes. No longer this home, this empty nest.

Thousands of photos more for me to scan, but the stack is getting shorter. Now is the time to simplify my life, so I do not replace these photos in their sleeves, in their albums, for the shelf again, but fling them carelessly into the large box that will be their coffin in a landfill. When my life has been simplified. Decluttered, even from the joys of these shelf-wasting precious items. They'll still be mine. Digitized and safe. All fitting on one disk and backed up on a cloud somewhere. An entire life on a disk. Like the gold record sent out on the Voyagers. A disk can be given to each of the children. I suppose shelves of disks will accrue, and only the future will say how one will go about simplifying life then.

It is another late night, following my wife to bed long after she's retired. I am satisfied with the shortening of the stack my Epson and I were able to accomplish today. Sex is no longer quotidian, but it remains special. Quotidian can even be mundane, but there is nothing mundane about sex nowadays. She is asleep, face softened, brow unfurrowed, lips slightly north of a neutral smile. I observe her in the dark. The dark softens her features, like a good airbrushing. There is my young beauty again. I have walked with you today through your childhood, Acapulco--with and without the bathing suits, the births and the birthdays, and the parties and the trips where landmarks served only backgrounds for the real life going on in the expressions on our children's faces. So beautiful.

But I don't need the dark.

Age may be the great equalizer between people like us and the beautiful people in the media (the current ones I have no idea who they are), but my love for her is like the stack of photo albums. I can only see her as I have always seen her: holding my hand, dancing with me, marrying me, postcoital bathing suits for propriety's sake, proud bellies of the unborn, mother of the born, co-parenting in the joys of the indescribable amount of work known as raising children right.

In the dark, her beauty, airbrushed by how I will always see her. But the dark has met its match. She glows in the dark for me. Framed forever for viewing later. Suddenly, mortality sounds lovely.