That photo I can’t find, but crystallized in my mind: his hand on my hand as we sat on the bed of the Bed&Breakfast his parents stayed at, the one time I met them, the same place my parents stayed when they visited me later, April (or was it May?) 1993 at Jesus College, Cambridge: we took the train to London, we took the train to Bath, my mother embarrassed me by wanting ice in everything she drank, my father just by being his big loud American self, he would fall from a mountain trail to his death just 3 years and a few months later but I, of course, didn’t know that then, or I might have minded less, he wrote in his journals we read later when he was gone, so we could better know him, how much he enjoyed their visit with me in England during my college “Study Abroad” semester, and how traveling (he so seldom got to do, at least internationally) inspired him to remember his love of history, how he really needed to “learn more about Mary Queen of Scotts” a phrase that became an inside joke between me and my husband (whom he didn’t get to meet before his death), because dear Dad was so voracious about all he was interested in and never had time for (I am exactly like this, and am now living longer than him, which is a strange realization), and he put such pressure on himself, on me and his other children, how it shaped us (for good and for ill), and the sad affection I’ll always feel for them: my mother, my father, the boyfriend from that intense time in my life, my husband, all gone now or transformed, the way our memories change over time, get rewritten, or become encapsulated and static, as if something still lives in those moments but is frozen, some small part of my soul remaining at that college so far away in England or captured in that still not-found photograph.
Recreating photos, or trying to!
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