My first studio baby picture

I love this photograph, and the frame especially. I think the design of the frame really captures the artistic sense of the early fifties. My mom used to keep it on her dresser when I was a child. Her dresser was always bathed in bright indirect light from a window to the side, so it was a very cheery place to be.

This picture, then, became wrapped up in the warm sunny memory of freshness, nice and clean, all laid out in a pretty orderly fashion, and the baby blue color and the silver foil shine of the circles still bring me back to that day when we lived with my grandmother and grandfather, after my mom got divorced when I was but a year old, and remained there until I was seven when she remarried.

Obviously, the photograph was taken before the divorce. But that mood in that sunny room at my grandparent’s place – so fresh, bright, and clean – I feel refreshed just to think of it, and this picture always brings me there.

My mom still had hope in those days of a shining future in which her dreams might all come true. And though many of them did not, she and I were always very close and shared a special non-verbal connection both then, and later when my stepfather completed our little family of three – a family that was always tight. We had a mood that felt like “us” – something that was larger than ourselves and our own individual personalities – something of which we were all apart, exclusively of anyone else on the planet.

I’m really kind of surprised that the frame survived all these years through so many moves to so many different cities. And more often than not, it has been plopped in a box with a number of other memory-items without any wrapping or packing material – just almost tossed in there.

I just re-discovered it last week in such a box, and have now placed it in a drawer in my dresser. Though I’d love to put it on my dresser and re-create that moment (since I am back to living in that very same house yet again), I’d be afraid of cats and earthquakes, and think I’ll just pull it out of the drawer from time to time when the sunshine is just right, and place it on my dresser and reminisce until I am drawn for a few precious moments back to those days in the mid-fifties when the world was new and the future was all ahead of us.