The last couple days I’ve been scanning a lot of old pictures. There are many, many pictures of me in various stages of development, from 1 year right on up through grad school commencement. It’s been a real nostalgic trip through the past; I even have some pictures of my mom as a baby.
It was obvious pretty quickly that the majority of the images I handled were taken by my grandmother. Her photographic fecundity surpassed mine by miles. With six grandchildren all in the same general age group, every Christmas turned into a photo op to rival the red carpet at the Golden Globes. Every time we saw her, it wasn’t long before our faces were cleaned and our hair was slicked back in preparation for another shoot. The holidays were especially big events, and every year my grandmother would line all the kids up, according to height, in front of her garage door and take a picture.
As my brother and I got older, we’d concoct funny poses every time my grandmother pointed her camera our way. Often we’d make like we were examining some object or other in great detail and with all our concentration. My grandmother seemed not to care much, so long as we were in the frame somewhere.
As I upload all these pictures of the flowers in our yard and of Ava, it occurs to me that my grandmother really would’ve loved this Web site. She would’ve loved looking at every one of these pictures of Ava and her little smiles and stretches. I never lose sight of the fact that — even if we take some of them for granted now — someday we’re going to be really glad to have all these images of our early lives together.