The Stranger in the Photo

Have you ever written an essay with your students?  When I have the time, I try. This time I wanted to do this assignment, which was modeled after Donald Murray's "The Stranger in the Photo is Me," and I'm so glad I did. While the students taught me so much about them, I was able to learn so much about myself.

Here is my essay:

I have many childhood photos I can recall. 

One where I am in red overalls with a Raggedy Ann, holding a pie fresh from the oven, on the front flap. My golden brown hair frames my chubby cheeks. I’m wearing blue canvass shoes that have a Snoopy and a Woodstock on the side, but one shoe is obscured because I have my leg tucked under me. I am not yet four, and in my big brown eyes, I have all the brightness and delight of a child that age.

In another, my long hair hangs over my tan shoulders as I lean down above my puppy dog cake, ready to blow out the seven candles. I’m with my mother and grandmother in an Amtrak train that’s Chicago-bound. My Snoopy doll, which I called Snoopy Snoopy Smup Smup, is sitting in the seat next to me. A sense of delight and wonder as I embark on my biggest journey yet and another year of life fill my eyes.

In these photos I’m a gregarious, fearless child. I’m gregarious because I know no stranger. I’m fearless because I don’t yet know the sharp edges of this world. In these photos I’m the same child who, at five years old, walks onto a stage in a dark theater and sings “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to a row of balding, cigar-smoking men who are casting for Damn Yankees. The spotlight and the whispers of these now faceless men do not intimidate me. I sing with the confidence of a child who knows no shame.

But one picture in particular haunts me. In this photo I’m about four years old and I am neither happy nor sad. Kermit the Frog, who hangs around my neck, is smiling, but I am staring at the camera as if I’m in mid-sentence. I have on my pajamas with the little elephants and lions—pajamas I remember well. They are pink and footed, and they are the ones I was wearing when, as I unzipped them, discovered the horrors of chicken pox.  

In this photo I am striking a pose, but not like that kind of pose. It’s someone else’s pose. I can tell because my little magnetic number and alphabet board is faced toward the man taking the picture, and not me.

In this photo I see a sense of sadness that I could not have known then, but as my older self—the self who has seen what’s on the other side—I see an eerie foreboding. At times I think that my child self is standing on a precipice and staring down into the rabbit hole of my adult life. At times I think that my child self—trapped in this forever mid-sentence—is saying, “Stay right here!”  

But as a child I wanted to do everything myself. I wanted reassurance, but I wanted independence more, like the moment I first tried out my lifejacket. At five years old I was ready to swim in the big lake, but I had my mother hold on to my lifejacket so I was sure it worked, and then I was off. Just as I rushed into big girl swimming, I rushed to my adulthood, but as I did so, I was inadvertently rushing into moments that shattered the person I could have been. Along the way, I collided into the men who stole my innocence, my mother abandoning me, my grandmother locking me out of the house, my hospital stays. In each moment, that gregariousness, that fearlessness, that independence died.

Life can chisel away at a person’s soul, and in my rushing, I never knew that. I hadn’t watched my great-grandfather die, hadn’t watched my grandmother age, hadn’t watched my baby brother find a juvenile record, hadn’t felt the punch of unemployment.

Just as I was posed in this picture, I was posed throughout my childhood, mostly as the victim. As I grew up, I tried different poses myself, and never ones that benefitted me: the depressed one, the silent one, the angry one, the defensive one, the shamed one, the bitter one. 

As I look back at those moments that killed what I could have been, those moments—and many other wonderful ones—are what gave rise to what I am today. My arms, which were the first to hold both my little brothers; my hands, which held my wife’s as we spoke our vows; my eyes, which have stored in them all the stunning mountains and canyons I’ve seen; my mind, which can give poetic language to what I think and feel; my feet, which allow me to stand before my students each and every day. 

The little girl in the picture doesn’t know any of that. She just wants to cling on to her innocence, and she wants me to stay with her forever, but I can’t. I have to grow up and become what life intended me to be: a wife, a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, an aunt, a teacher, a friend, and ultimately, a survivor.