Missing Pictures

I.
Today, I watched CBS Sunday Morning for the first time in a long time. I'm glad I did because I saw this segment on home movies.

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II. More than seven months ago, I blogged about one of my favorite poems, "This Is a Photograph of Me" by Margaret Atwood, a haunting poem about what isn't visible: her drowned self.

III.
More recently, a Facebook friend posted a trove of old family photographs, going back generations, showing her ancestors and herself at different ages, in different marriages, in different places.

I envy her.

IV.
Much of my life, to which I once had access, simply disappeared when my father's wife (my mother died when I was 16) took him, or sold them, or threw them away, without asking if any of his adult children might want them.

V.
As a child, I remember often lingering in the long private hall leading into my parents' bedroom. My mother had hung a series of framed black-and-white photos, ranging from youthful photos of both parents to her piloting my brother's aquaplane (just before sinking it) and Daddy sporting one of the wooden family runabouts always named Hoodlum (insert number here).

In a hall closet, hundreds more photographs lay stacked in boxes; the attic held 16mm films (two I remember especially, one starring Mr. Casey, whom my mother dated before my father) featuring horror scripts penned, acted in, and filmed by Mother and Daddy and their circle of friends in the early 1930s and two stop-motion films of my oldest brother celebrating a first Christmas.

VI.
Not a drowned child, perhaps.

But a loss as deeply felt: the record of my parents' childhoods and young adult years, of my initial nuclear family now blown apart by negligence, death, and time, and location, and life experience.

VII.
I am rarely lonely in real time now.

But I am often lonely because of the loss of time's record then.