Blogger’s Note: Every Friday I’m sharing a post from the 320 that have accumulated over the last eleven years. The one below is from 2019–about my late parents’ marriage and the consolation of an old photograph. If you enjoy this piece, please check out some others and subscribe to A Napper’s Companion. Just enter your email in the column to the right and hit “follow.” Thanks and peace, John Coleman 

The photograph of Mom and Dad may as well have fluttered into my hands from a cloudless sky. They were kids, younger than my own Elena and Micah, now thirty and twenty-seven. There’s no “Dolly and Denny” on the back, followed by a date. My guess, late 1947, their first apartment, no children yet. Mom is seated, Dad standing over her shoulder, passing her hair through his fingertips. Their expressions are carefree, Mona Lisa smiles on them both. The instant is tender, the future a blue heaven of hope.

Mom died in 1998, arthritis remedies having given more punishment than relief. The burden of divorce pained her sense of self in like fashion. I miss how she tucked my hair behind my ear when I was a teenager.

Dad lived to be eighty-five, but insisted that he was eighty-eight. “Is my mother still alive?” he asked now and then, anguished and embarrassed. “But she couldn’t be, could she?” He taught me to hold doors open and pay respects. Booing was rude; he was right.

Dad’s possessions have slept in my basement since 2012–picture albums and a rattle of keepsakes. I could say that they’ve gathered dust because I’m lazy or that I’ve purposefully neglected wife Kathy’s pleas to decide what to hang onto and let go of. The truth is, I didn’t want to stare into the archive of memories and visit again with those whose absence aches in my chest if I think of them for long.

Once the first box stood open, the choices were obvious. Dad was meticulous in documenting the mundane: scores of various views of his living room and dining room and bedroom, populated only by furniture and lamps; multiples of the same snowbirds lounging beside the same Florida swimming pool. Keepers went beside me on the couch: a boyish Navy portrait: nameless relatives gone on to glory before my time; a former residence, front yard and stoop. There weren’t many of Mom, which wasn’t a surprise. After twenty-five years together, “Dolly and Denny” quickly became “Denny and Mary.” I hold no grudge on this account. My parents weren’t suited to each other. Their pursed, weary expressions on and off camera told of disappointment that wore a rut into their souls.

After separating in the mid-1970s, they both knew joy, but it’s hard to describe them as happy people. Their union yielded fine children, but also a mournful descant that sounded above nuptial vows to the end of their days. This, then, is how I remember my parents: two people with much to celebrate, but who often swam up upstream emotionally. For decades I’ve thought of them with warmth, but more than a little sadness.

Affection and the blues stayed with me for the hours I sorted through what was dear to Dad–hanging on and letting go. Then, suddenly, that picture. 

One of my siblings told me that our mother and father were happy early on. As the youngest of four, though, I recall a tense, distant relationship. It’s naive to infer too much from one photograph, but I know my parents’ faces well enough to detect fakery. In this one moment, on this one day, my mother and father were glad to be together. Whatever went wrong was still some ways off. Mom was fussy about her hair, but here it was loosely pulled back. Dad held the ponytail, gently, playfully. Beautiful, that’s the only word for it. To find them this way moves my soul the way a good port warms the throat.

Eventually I’ll stop carrying Dolly and Denny everywhere with me, setting them on my desk at St. John’s in Oniontown, where I stare at their fair skin, not yet worn by truths to come, then out at the pine trees and corn stubble and red barn. It is as if I’ve recovered a treasure I never knew was lost. Let me take these two kids into my arms, watch them together, hear their voices. They did once love each other, after all. I’ll hang on to this truth for the rest of my life, even as it hangs on to me.