Picture This

Ray Levine

When I was about three or four years old, a traveling street photographer took a picture of me sitting on a pony in front of a ship that sold men’s shirt collars. There I still am, 90 years later, perched on the pony, biting my lip but still looking pleased and perhaps even proud, with a big bow in my hair and my feet clad in high, laced shoes. Where the pony’s head should be, there is only a blur, as the animal chose to turn away from the camera when its master pressed the shutter.
That photo is the only one I have of myself as a child. I have no pictures at all of my father, who died in 1927, the year I turned 14. I remember someone taking a picture of him once, but I have never been able to find where that photo is, if it exists at all. It is possible that I am the only person left in the world who has an image of my father’s face as a memory.
Beginning in the 1930s, after I got married, I found myself being photographed often; my husband liked to take pictures and record our activities and those of our relatives and friends. (He recorded our incomes and expenses, too, in detailed accounts that tracked every penny that entered or exited the house. You’ll find a record in one of our budget books of the dime he once found in the coin return of a public phone.)
My husband and I placed all our photos in albums. Years after my husband passed away, I removed many of them and mounted them in collage fashion in big frames, so I could see them on my walls every day. I have a half dozen such photo collages in my apartment, and more photos displayed everywhere, on flat surfaces in the foyer, living room and bedroom and in the kitchen too --- there, I have another photo collage and framed snapshots on the counter as well. While I eat, I gaze at many family members and friends who are no longer alive, as well as the many adults and children in the families of my two daughters. I look into their eyes, and they look into mine. In that way, all of them are always with me.
When my daughters and their children and their children’s children come to my apartment, they sometimes pause in front of one photo or another and wonder, “Did I really wear my hair that way as a teenager?” or “Is that really my mother?” or “Who is that handsome man with you, Bubby?” I can give them short answers, but each photo has a story, sometimes a long one… a little chapter in the many chaptered story of my life.