Recorder

Aside from the obvious, I love this photograph for the truth it captures. Right out in the open.
Mom’s in the back. Robert’s the one standing, really hamming it up for the camera. Little Sara’s the baby of course; she’s right there in the middle doing exactly what I remember asking, “Let’s sit for a nice picture!”
And Becky’s on the right there. Her hair was always only slightly longer than mine back then, so if you put the tips of your fingers on the photograph over the ends of her hair: There I am. That’s the way we always did it. We took turns posing with the other kids. Because what’s the use in having the same face twice in the same photograph?
Anyway, aside from the obvious, I love how this photograph captures just who we were and just who we would grow up to be.
Robert sang rockabilly right up until the war. He used to say, “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing,” every night in the living room with the trio. It was his opening line. I remember hating him for it.
“Do you really have to practice your opening line, Robert Hayrick?”
“Sure I do, I have to make sure it sounds real.”
Later, his was the voice I associated with the music of that time, not Elvis’.
And Little Sara. She was just the quietest child. Just a pleasure all the time. It really is no wonder she grew up to be a nurse and was the one that stayed with Daddy till he was gone. And even then—when he was gone—she never really did much. We all sort of assumed she’d at least have a passing interest in seeing somewhere other than here. But apparently, she didn’t. She stayed right there in that big house in that little town, never really changing her sweet self from one holiday to the next, which is how often Becky and I tried to visit.
The house was always clean, quiet, and pleasant. Really it was the center of our universe, and Little Sara was always its keeper. And she really was just as sweet as this photograph suggests. She passed late last year of lung cancer.
We didn’t even know she was ill.
Then there’s my Becky. My lifelong best pal. My twin. I’m not sure any of us ever—even for a minute—suspected that she would be anything other than the best mother this world has ever seen. Becky married John Sullivan, a boy with flat feet and a delicatessen in the family, on our seventeenth birthday. It was the happiest I ever saw her until the twins were born. And then that was the happiest I had ever seen her until the second set of twins were born.
That’s the truth. I see all these things in this photograph. Clear as day. Right out in the open. As if these things were all happening just at the same time as I was taking the photo. And maybe that’s what it says about me. Maybe I was only ever meant to be the observer. The recorder of things.