Hashtag Throwback Thursday. This is not a photograph of me. It is a photograph of my Aunt Laura, the youngest sister of my grandmother. My aunt who lived above my other aunt, her sister Rose. My aunt who kept a yellow canary named Dickey who when he died, bought another yellow canary and named it Dickey. It seems like nothing, this photograph. An old woman is carrying groceries and a newspaper. Seems so ordinary. Look again. This is what I have been doing on Thursday. This is what I do in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep on Monday and Tuesday. This is what I do on Saturday and Sunday. I get up quietly so as not to wake the dogs. Not to wake my wife. I put on a dim light. I read a book or try to read a book but the sentences somehow turn to memories. I pull out a shoebox of photographs and flip through them to find myself again, or to see where I went wrong, to see what happened that made me end up here. I’m not sure what I am trying to say. I think what I am trying to say is that in my youth on the east side of Buffalo, New York I was surrounded daily by what I wrongly assumed to be the ordinary. There was the butcher and there the bakery. There was the flower shop with the black mynah bird that hopped around on the counter or stood staring out the window. We jingled the bell above the door and stood fascinated before it as it said hello in greeting. A bird said hello and it pleased us until it didn’t. There was the milk machine that coughed up dimes and there was my aunt walking down the street. It occurs to me sometimes in the middle of the night how little I know about her. The non-filtered Lucky Strikes she smoked or was it Pall Mall? The yellow canary. The candy dish of kisses. With new eyes I look again at my aunt walking, the ordinary pedestrian, and I see myself. I see myself in her conspiratorial smile as she hinted at her past in the ways we all do. Relaying bits and pieces the best way we can. She was the wild one. The one who snuck out through windows to go dancing and drinking in her own youth. The one who had a married lover who I only knew as the bookie. But it is more than this too, this photograph brings back that former me. The dumb one reading books, leafing through New Yorker magazines, wanting to get out and out and out, sick of the same sidewalks. The milk machine. The way the light slanted in winter and then left altogether. I looked and listened but failed to see or hear. In the middle of the night, in dim light, I turn the photograph to let the light catch it so I can see it better. So that I can see what I missed. What I missed was the extraordinariness of the ordinary. The light tilting. The weight of the bag, and yesterday’s news in a hand I once held.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of the backyard of 7 Dorris Avenue on the east side of Buffalo, New York. It doesn’t look like much. This was the tiny patch that was my grandmother’s backyard. When I was little she would pull out a wooden sandbox with a little colored canvas roof and set it there so I could climb in to play. She’d give me a bucket of water so that I could make rivers and lakes. She hung laundry on the line that blew in the breeze like ghosts. I have a photograph of my grandfather standing in that backyard. He is with my mother when she was a little girl. He died when she was five. In the photograph, I can see the laundry line pole and I can see the little wire fence. There is no sandbox. There is a little terrier I never knew. I look into the eyes of my mother as a child and see her as an adult. I look at the plants in the photograph. Scrutinize them. One summer I hacked away the overgrowth in her backyard and came to a cluster of hyacinth. They were planted from Easter gifts from the past and all at once, below the overgrowth from the scrub trees and shrubs, there they were again. Off-handedly, she told me the date she planted them, cut some flowers and brought them inside. The wood of the sandbox rotted away. My grandmother and mother are just photographs now. The house still stands, last one nearest the corner now after a fire took the neighboring one. I like to imagine the hyacinth she planted has taken over and blooms in purples and whites. It is the fragrance of the hyacinth that brings me back to her. There she is again with the scissors cutting the stems at an angle. The heavy flower heads bending the weak stalk. There is my mother again. There is the sandbox with its river of tap water. There is the colored canvas and the sheets blowing on the line. The photograph is the silent reminder. I want to be able to hear her Polish accent in it, I want to hear her swear when she drops a wooden clothesline and takes another from her pocket. I want to hear the sound of the shovel in the sand, hear the water carve away the river. I want to see the hyacinth in the glass on the kitchen table, the room a perfume. I go back there. To the glass on the table. I stand at the sink and look out the window to the backyard, to the wire fence, to that summer’s overgrowth and everything I carry within.