If I should meet thee After long years, How should I greet thee? With silence and tears.

— Lord Byron

To Trace Their Shadows

Mark Goodman

2011

… to trace their shadows, with the magic hand of chance.

— John Keats

July 1956

At my Aunt Adele’s wedding reception, a professional photographer takes our only family portrait, a picture of my mother, father, and me posing in my grandparent’s living room. My father looks directly into the camera without his glasses, cheating the glare of the flash, while my mother, wearing a star print dress and wrist length gloves, tightly grips my upper arm, holding me in place. I’m a ten-year-old dressed in a suit and tie, standing in front, with a half-smile on my face. “Wild Indian” is a phrase my parents often use to describe me, a kid growing up running helter-skelter, firing cap guns and water pistols, stabbing with a toy knife, and letting arrows fly.

May 1957

For my eleventh birthday, my parents buy me a Brownie Hawkeye point-and-shoot camera to use at overnight camp in Maine. My initiation into photography begins at this party. I take half a dozen shots of classmates on the front steps of our house, a ready-made studio with elevated rows. The three girls (Ellen, Judy, and Laurie) wear frilly, layered dresses and pose demurely; four of the six boys (Bruce, Eddie, Stanley, and Jimmy), dressed in their best, act goofy as I snap their picture. An adult subsequently photographs all six boys (which includes Charlie, Billy, and myself, as the seventh) holding still and dutifully obeying. The week after my birthday party, to finish the black and white roll of film, I take two separate pictures of my mother and father.

I photograph my father standing on the front steps before he heads off to work, one hand in his pocket, jingling change as he often does. He’s dressed in a white shirt with pocket protector and a clip on bow tie; however, lurking beneath this buttoned-down costume is a street corner kid, an eighth grade dropout, who hangs around killing time waiting for action — a card game, a baseball game, a pool game, a sexy dame. His parents call him a loafer for wanting to play games, believing his nickels and dimes more essential to supporting the family through the Depression than his dreams. As I photograph him, he stares off in a moment of posed reverie, a calm belying his habitual and indelible screaming rages. I take my mother’s picture while she sits in a folding lawn chair on the gravel driveway, sunbathing, holding a hairbrush and struggling to see the camera because of her progressive blindness. She is thirty-seven. As an adolescent, she dislikes the mama’s boys her aunts try to fix her up with, young men who hold the promise of future professional success and financial security, but whom she finds dull. After high school, she briefly works as a secretary in a downtown Boston

office, navigating city streets and subways with limited eyesight, knowing her next misstep will make her a permanent invalid, a life of sorrow and pain. Growing ever more fearful, she quits her job to remain at home. My father, at twenty, is shipped from the Bronx to his aunt’s house in Boston to put distance between him and his wannabe wise guy Italian buddies after his release from a short stint in jail. He quickly sweeps his eighteen-year-old first cousin, my mother, off her feet.

July 1957

At Camp Manitou, I learn to shoot a 22-caliber rifle, but, surprisingly, I’m more excited by seeing the movie, April Love, starring Pat Boone. A dozen of us are taken to the local theatre where we sit in the tiny balcony eating popcorn, drinking Coke, talking and giggling as the sappy scenes play out in the semi-darkness. Lyrics from a song in this movie are impossible for me to get out of my head. On a day like today, we passed the time away, writing love letters in the sand.* I sing them to myself, again and again. This excursion is also the occasion, or excuse, for our counselor, Steve, to meet up with his girlfriend, Bonnie, who works at our sister camp, Matoaka, a place we call, “Aunt Charlotte’s,” where the girls are, and where we don’t want to be and can’t get to anyway. The other boys and I endlessly belt out, My Bonnie lies over Aunt Charlotte’s, not the ocean, since it’s just a lake, to Steve whenever we see him during the day, taunting him for being in love. At camp, I don’t make lasting friendships, win trophies, or acquire newfound skills as a sportsman, though I do get a certificate from the National Rifle Association welcoming me into their ranks as a junior sharpshooter.

With my Brownie Hawkeye, I take nearly four-dozen 3x3 inch Kodacolor snapshots. Two of these show the flagpole we gather around, standing at attention saluting before each breakfast and dinner. I first picture it from pinnacle to base, letting everything else in the scene fall where it may; next, I move closer, eye-balling a building on the right, a mass of overhanging pine branches and sliver of silvery sky above, and a two-toned Oldsmobile’s fins and red-eyed tail lights on the left, before pressing the shutter again. The reason for this second picture (and most of the rest) is not my fascination with the place, but my innate discovery of the game of photography itself — juggling visual objects within the edges of a frame and stopping time with a click. I don’t photograph any of my fellow campers; instead, during free periods after lunch, I take pictures of buildings surrounded by trees with elevations in high noon shadows: the bunkhouses, the arts and craft

* Love Letters in the Sand, lyrics by Nick & Charles Kenny, 1931

shack, the boathouse, the rifle and archery ranges, the basketball hoop, the tennis courts, and the baseball diamond with clouds in the sky echoing the bases below. I take sixteen photographs by the lake and nine more near the ocean on a field trip. I snap one of a teenager jumping off a distant pontoon into the water, my only stop action shot. I don’t catch the diver in mid-air but at the fraction of a second before the balls of his feet leave the edge of the deck; he is both flying and fixed. I’m a natural at photography. I walk, stop, take a bite out of the scene and swallow it whole, all by pushing a button. I make pictures by moving my arms higher or lower, stepping from side to side and back and forth, doing photographic calisthenics.

August 1957

Returning from camp, I assemble my first photograph album, a light blue, three-ring binder with black pages in acetate sleeves. My Aunt Reenie is the inspiration for this undertaking. She’d fashioned her own photograph album the year before, now these summer camp pictures become my excuse for emulating her. I place an 8x10 inch formal studio picture with a hand painted starburst background of myself made at age three in short pants held up by suspenders, a white shirt, and a bow tie, as the introduction. The first half of my album is chaotic and crowded, a choppy timeline with large narrative gaps, and, more often than not, fuzzy snapshots. I stick one hundred and five photographs of myself, an only child, onto these pages using white photo corners. I’m in a crib or a stroller. I stand unsteadily holding an outstretched hand. I’m in a snowsuit on the street in winter and a sunsuit at the seashore in summer. I sit on my father’s lap in front of the triple-decker apartment building where we live during the late-1940s with my grandparents and two aunts. These pictures are taken to affirm and marvel at my being, not to document family life.

At the album’s mid-way point, I put the two black and white photographs of my parents next to each other. I follow this pair with my eleventh birthday party snapshots and, finally, my summer camp pictures in three somewhat jumbled sections: “Camp Manitou. July 1957.” “Reid State Park. 1957.” “Wild Animal Farm. 1957.” I don’t index pictures exclusively by subject, such as, baseball field, boats, buildings, or in any narrative or chronological order; the two of the flagpole are twenty-seven photographs apart, as if I shuffled the deck before laying them down. I begin the camp section with a shot of four archery targets in an open field framed against a dark stand of trees. Sending an arrow along a sightline is like pointing a finger at a subject, seeing and hitting a standing target. In archery, the white, black, blue, red, gold paper target is circular and seen in the distance. In photography, the target is phantasmagoria swimming in glass, pressed against my chest. On

an untitled album page, between the pictures from the state park and the campgrounds, I place prints taken on parents’ weekend at the motel where my mother and father stay. I’m seen alone in two of them, and in another pair, I’m standing beside each of my parents separately, my father snaps one and my mother the other. There is also a picture of the motel facade in glowing, late afternoon sunlight reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting — spare, poignant, and disconsolate — depicting a metal lawn chair embellished with diamond hole patterns in the seat back, its shadow ebbing across the wall. At camp this same weekend, a photograph portrays me flexing an archery bow about to shoot an arrow. Before this picture is taken, the counselor clearly tells me not to nock the arrow in the bowstring as I pose, so I don’t accidentally release it, striking the person I’m aiming at, my father, who holds the Brownie Hawkeye camera in his hands. My father shoots me, not the other way around.

After this section, my album becomes a scrapbook filled with sedate group portraits taken at day camp from 1953-1955; an 8x10 inch glossy tableau vivant photograph of my mother with two girlfriends planning for their 20th high school reunion; three newspaper clippings about my winning third prize in a children’s art contest; and a timeline of head and shoulder portraits of me from annual picture day — “say cheese” — school rituals. There are also several loose snapshots. One shows my father leaning against the clubhouse he builds in the backyard for me while I’m at overnight camp, a small structure made from scavenged lumber hammered together without plans or conventional framing strategies. He is casually dressed, arms behind his back, eyes closed, dreaming sweetly.

July 1958

At twelve, I hang around the house all summer. I take a picture of my mother standing by a tree in the front yard; then we trade places, and she takes my picture. I don’t know why we do this, except as a lazy day amusement. My mother, in a one-piece bathing suit and an orange, floppy straw hat shielding her eyes from the sun, appears as if she is on the Riviera modeling for a French painter, rather than a snapshot by me. Swimming is the only physical activity she enjoys when young and numerous pictures of her by the ocean exist, but this is one of the many days as an adult she dresses for the beach without any intention of getting wet or leaving home. Sparkling reveries of youth and the seashore unconsciously substitute for the lonely suburban world that shrouds her days. I pose with slouching shoulders, wearing a striped T-shirt, khaki shorts, white socks and leather shoes. I smile obliviously.

FAMILY ALBUM

1. To Trace Their Shadows

2. My Fictions – But Her Story

____________________________

Text & Editing

Mark Goodman

Bastrop, Texas

Pigment Printing

Peter Williams

AgavePrint

Austin, Texas

Binding & Box

Jace Graf

Cloverleaf Studio

Austin, Texas

Limited to an edition of three of which this is # ____

Bob Goodman

1918 – 1995

With every wave that breaks

Alice Goodman

1920 – 1996