You’re looking at a photograph of a photograph of my dad. His name was Ron.
The black line running along what is now its right edge is a tattooed reminder of the wallet it lived in for a number of years I couldn’t even guess at, black dye having run from the leather onto the strip of paper not covered by the photo sleeve within it.
At one point, what we now consider this side edge will have been part of its surface. A reminder of how things change. Always.
The majority of the photographs surface is mottled with a combination of uniform dots and smudged colour. More scars from the wallet it lived in but, more specifically, the textured material of the plastic cover it sat behind, along with a ‘lucky’ dollar bill I’d collected on a childhood holiday, impressing itself and disturbing the chemicals on the paper.
The bottom left hand corner as we see it now has, for the most part, been spared. A passport photograph of a woman who is now my ex-wife will have taken most of the hits having sat over this image in the same sleeve.
Somewhat cruelly, most of the erosion occurs around the face, although I can still see he is smiling. The eyes are a giveaway and a marking over his mouth can’t hide a look I remember so well. Perhaps it’s not that clear and I just know what to look for. It doesn’t matter.
The smudges along the right side of his torso and left shoulder lead me towards Marty McFly performing at the ‘Enchantment Under the Sea’ dance in Back to the Future and how, more significantly, these blurs symbolise the condition of my memories of him 23 years since he died. We remember some things more clearly than we do others, but there’s no denying we never recall something exactly as it was, no matter how much we think we do – merely interpretations of events rather than the facts we may think they are.
That said, I do remember this photograph was taken in Cyprus, August 2000; we always went away in August and Cyprus was the last holiday we had together. Those smiling eyes make it hard to fathom our family had only seven months ahead of us as a four. We had no idea and we were not prepared for life without him.
His t-shirt is from Maine, a once popular franchise within Debenhams, popular amongst men of a certain age. I can remember its weight; a strong t-shirt for a strong man. No doubt the shorts were Maine too.
I lost that wallet some time around 2015 on the short journey from my car to what was then my front door. A loss usually no more than an inconvenience through the admin it brings, I felt this more keenly. The thought of it being found, emptied and tossed troubled me. He deserved better. How interesting to see it that way.
It brought back feelings of ‘losing’ him. I’d given the image (along with any of his belongings) a weight beyond the reality of what it is – a piece of paper. Somehow he was with me if that photo was with me. But I didn’t lose him. The language you use is important and to say ‘I lost my dad’ implies, on some level, a carelessness or even blame. He died. It’s a thing that happened and there’s nothing I could have done about it. It took me 21 years to land on that, my tears of relief blotted the ink in my journal as I did.
In 2019, I’d pushed my VW Golf too far. The mechanic who had performed its MOT since 2006 had moved on from “when you sell this, let me know” to “don’t bring this back to me next year.” It had to be scrapped – something my dad would have been quite disappointed in – and, as with the image, I’d given the car more weight than needed having been a fixture in my life and its events for 13 years. As a result, sending it to pasture felt more appropriate and palatable than handing it over to a new driver.
It’d given me a lot in that time; road trips to France, and Spain and countless visits along the UK’s coastline throughout my 20’s and 30’s, and it gave until the very end – it’s parting gift something tangible it’d held, incredibly, in the space between the passenger seat and the runners it sat on for four years: the wallet and this photograph of my dad inside it.
I’d searched, but not hard enough. Story of my life at that point.
Now, this image shares a pot with some pens. I see it for what it is, a piece of paper that carries an image of a man and no more.
JF