This may be my favorite picture from those days – those days when we didn’t seem to live at one address for more than six months. Maybe I’m drawn to its mystery because it’s a bit blurry and washed out – you can’t make out any detail.
It’s much like the faded memory attached to it, I can’t remember any detail.
I think I have just a flickering memory of taking this picture. Or, maybe after looking at it for so many years, I’ve just come to believe I took it.
It’s my core family, frozen in a moment revealing no resentment or conflict, only unrealized potential.
It was shot between first and second step dads, not long after mom got custody and got us out of the foster home, probably 1964 – 1965.
That was our ’59 Impala they were leaning on, the first car I drove. I was 13 or 14 and mom said, “When you turn 16, that’s your car.” But that was a promise not kept.
I came to realize, “It’s the thought that counts.” was our family motto.
My mom gave me my real dad’s old Argus C3 (The Brick) camera years after they divorced. I don’t know how she managed to hang on to it.
My siblings and I were in JDH and foster homes when she had to vacate the house because of the divorce. She accepted a friend’s offer to store our things in their NE Portland basement.
That storage turned out to be an exclusive, free garage sale for those friends. I lost everything there.
I loaded some black & white film in that Argus C3 and tried it out. That could be why the picture is overexposed and out of focus.
I have a thick book, like a photo album, but it’s for storing negatives. It’s packed with pages of old negative stripes. Maybe while staying at home to avoid the Corona Virus I’ll find time to page through it and solve the mystery of did I really take that picture?
God is good – even when he doesn’t keep to my schedule.
