Ageing through Pictures
On my dad and grandmother's birthdays, the passing of time, and dreaming.
This past Saturday, my dad turned 65. Nona, my maternal grandmother, turns 85 today.
On visits back to the house I grew up in, and that my parents and grandparents have shared for four decades, I typically go through their drawers looking for old pictures, both mine and theirs. My mom keeps our family’s photos in albums and paper packets they’d hand you with the negatives when you got photos developed at the grocery store. Nona’s are in a box in her bedroom closet.
Initially, I searched out of curiosity for my own past. In even their pictures, I sought to trace lines back and forth to myself. A few years ago, I recorded Nona and Nono talking about their lives and used their photos from before I was born to spark memories and hear stories they’d never told me. One photo of Nono standing like a coach beside his soccer team became a story about the traits I wish we didn’t share.
On visits home the past year, I’ve sought something else from these pictures.
I don’t know about you, but I feel so close to dying now, in my mid-30s. Everything I’ve read says it’s normal to feel this way approaching middle age. Because the distance to our youth is now farther than our distance to the nursing home, we panic-buy a Mercedes, trade in our spouse, and fly to foreign lands for new teeth, hair, and boobs.
In Didi, a movie I watched two weeks ago at Downtown West that my friend Der brought up at church Sunday morning, the mother is a homemaker and painter from Taiwan whose artistic work has gained her no recognition or money. She’s maybe 40, 45 years old. Her son is an American teenager, much like Der and I were. He’s trying to fit in with his American American1 peers, reconciling (often subconsciously) the quickly changing world around him with the one his mother comes from. In a heartfelt scene near the end of the film, she’s opening up to him, and he seems to recognize that his mother is her own person, too. She also has hopes and fears, dreams and regrets. “You know, sometimes I sit and think about how I ended up here,” she says. “So ordinary.” But she’s learned to accept her failings as an artist, she explains, because her dream of making it has been transferred down to her children (I’ve explored this concept a bit, in connection to The Farewell, another immigrant story, here in the past).
For as long as I can remember, my dad has told my brother and me that it is our responsibility to do better in this country than he has. Since we were little, he envisioned for us the life that immigrants see on American television programs and uproot themselves for. We were to make more money, own more stuff, and live with a greater sense of comfort than he could. But unlike my friends from more hard-ass immigrant traditions (see Korea, Nigeria, and Pakistan), we had the freedom to choose how we check off the boxes. (Of course, that didn’t make him any happier that I chose to study Latin America and journalism and not economics in college.) Still, I can’t help wondering: what were his dreams before his sole purpose became providing that imagined future for us? Before the mission, at its most altruistic, became sacrifice.
Looking at old pictures of my dad and Nona makes me yearn to know the dreams they had from before they rewrote them for us. How did they see themselves and the road ahead when they were 35 and 25 and 17? I can’t stop thinking about when they realized they’d never become what they hoped to be when they were kids. Or even what they hoped to be, since older generations, especially those that rose from poverty but haven’t climbed as high up Maslow’s Hierarchy as I have, seldom express it.
Despite looking like it could be the cover of a Zach Bryan album, the grainy photo that opens this story was taken by a drunk Portuguese dude on an annual November hunting trip my dad took to Kansas and Colorado with his friends from 1996 until the early 2000s. I can’t verify the date of the photo, but if it were 1996, that would make this version of my dad 38 years old—three years older than I am today. On those trips, from what he’s recounted, he killed many hundreds of jackrabbits and pheasant, drank many thousands of beers, and had as much fun as I do on my annual trout fishing trips to Bluff City and Arkansas with my friends.
On late nights after the blood from the slaughter had been washed off, drinking whiskey by the campfire, did he tell his friends, “I never wanted to be a plumber. I always thought I’d be a pilot. I always thought I’d fly a plane to Timbuktu and open up a fishing lodge on the banks of the Niger River.”
The photo of my grandmother is from her honeymoon in 1961. I think it was taken in Córdoba, Argentina, which isn’t too far from Rosario, where, for the first years of their marriage, she and Nono lived in a house with her parents. For as long as I’ve been her grandson, Nona has never worked a job or driven a car. She speaks no English despite living in America and Australia for half her life. She seeks conversation and friendship at every turn but has no one to get it from besides the family because she, like so many of the older women in my family, has been confined to the four walls of her house for most of her life.
From what I’ve gleaned in my interviews with her, Nona was pulled from school after sixth grade and sent to learn how to sew and do other useful domestic duties, which was common for girls from working-class families in Rosario in the 1950s. She was essentially waiting around to be married. Her father, a totalitarian Italian immigrant, did not believe women should work. Nono was her first real boyfriend, and they were married despite feeling no affection for each other because that’s what you did back then. If a man was a good worker and a woman wanted a baby, they tied the knot and found a way to bear each other. Nona describes what happened to her as a transfer, her job essentially the same as it had been before: cook, clean, serve, and not make a fuss when the men stayed up late smoking in the living room or traveled to soccer games in other cities to drink and fight while the women were at home with the babies.
I am very hard on my family. I question and prod them about all of their decisions, why they didn’t do more for themselves and, selfishly, for me. But I imagine how unimaginably hard it would be to live at a time, to be in a position where you could no longer dream. Today, I can hate my job, resent my career, be depressed by my cowardice, and feel overwhelmed by the weight of providing for my family. But my dreams haven’t gone anywhere. My ambition hasn’t yet become making it to retirement in one piece or dying peacefully in my sleep, as it has been for so many others who were convinced that hoping for anything else is silly.
I haven’t given up. I can’t give up.
Because I know it isn’t fair to expect Alba to dream of becoming a professional soccer player or a published playwright, Enzo an Olympic wrestling champion, Elio an ethnically ambiguous hair model in Los Angeles, if I don’t model dreaming for them. When they talk with each other about their mom and me on their sibling trips to the Rocky Mountains and Ushuaia in 20 years, I want them to say, “Dad is so annoying. Did you read that last thing he wrote about traveling back in time to ride a bike to an old movie theater?” or “Daddy would’ve loved us being here together.” And not, “We’ll never be like him when we grow up. He’s so sad. He’s so depressing.” I know how easily, how few steps I really am, from becoming that future I don’t want for my children.
On birthdays that aren’t my own, staring at pictures of people who aren’t me, I can’t help but think about the time left and how I’ll spend it. I have some months to figure it out before I turn 36 in February, one year closer to death, one year further from the young man who thought he’d conquer the world. Though what I’m certain of is that the dreaming won’t stop, no matter how much my knees creak and my back hurts from sneezing in my sleep.
I use this term, which has often been used for me, to describe people whose families no longer have any cultural connection to the lands their ancestors came from. These would’ve been the third- and fourth-generation Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican kids in Bayonne. In Knoxville, it’s people like my wife, whose ancestors have been cooking up shine in the hill country since before the Civil War.