Relics

I’ve stared at the picture above many times, searching for similarities—not between my childhood counterpart and my father’s younger self, though; rather, I seek commonalities between my father’s smile then and my own now. I look for traces of what’s been handed down, hoping I’ve managed to catch some semblance of that indescribable quality that has raised my father to an almost mythical status in my eyes.

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Over the summer, I managed to transfer most of my home movies over to DVD, my ongoing campaign to ensure my recorded past never deteriorates. Obsession is a somewhat strong word, but the process of recording these VHS tapes to DVD and then recording those to my computer only to copy those files to a harddrive suggests something along those lines.

However, I didn’t stop at my home movies. My wife and I cataloged our extensive family photo collections, as well, readying them to be scanned into our computers, hoping to preserve each image before time wears away its clarity. In addition, we’ve boxed away receipts, letters, and knick-knacks, each telling its own tale of our lives together. In fact, I’ve become so enamored with relics like these that I wrote a short story about a son stumbling across a relic of his father’s, a letter that changed the dynamics of their relationship forever (this was the story picked up for publication last month, so at least my obsession has led me in the right direction when it comes to writing).

But I wonder why I obsess so much over these pieces of history; after all, as so many stories, movies, and after school specials tell us, our memories are the most important records of these events, the images we’ll take with us long after other relics are gone, lost or destroyed by age.

Knowing this, though, does not quell the obsession; in fact, it rages harder now than it ever has before. And more than ever, I study these relics, searching for answers, rather than simply enjoying them. Like an archaeologist, I try my best to preserve these artifacts for future study, perhaps when I’m old enough to uncover their meaning, perhaps when I experience enough to understand their tale.

And although I’ve copied countless movies and photos and I’ve cataloged these relics in chronological order and carefully filed them away in a closet, I come back to one of these more than any of the others: a picture taken when I was six and my father was thirty-two, both of us smiling one summer’s evening. However, unlike it did in the past, my attention now moves away from my own smile and the happiness I felt in my father’s arms to strictly the smile on my father's beaming face, and I wonder: Will my own son or daughter find such safety in my arms? Will I have the strength to inspire such a feeling? Do I have the strength now to be the legend my father has become in my thoughts? To many sons, I’m sure, their fathers become the paragons of manhood, the models upon which they must be molded. In the beginning, that time of molding lies far in the unrealized future, a hazy endpoint we shoot for without ever really thinking we’ll find, until one day you’re looking through old photos and realize: I’m almost that age now, and I don’t feel legendary. I don’t feel mythical. I feel ordinary, like I did last year and the year before. I feel no different than when I did when I was twenty or even fifteen.

When do I become that larger-than-life figure?

Sometimes, the questions fade, usually after I’ve shared a good laugh with my old man, and my vision can pull back and focus on both of our smiles, and I can find satisfaction in knowing we still smile like that now. However, pulling back becomes more difficult as I near his age, and I can only hope that when my picture is taken then, my smile looks something like his.