I found some old photos

Did your family also insist on smiling for every photo?

Pre-S:

I’ve been working on an essay about J(ance) D(ance)¹ Vance’s comment about child-free people being less “mentally stable” than child-having people. But it turns out all I really want to say is I was pleased to see not only did child-free women come out swinging against his comments, but moms did, too. Ahem: 

When JanceDance makes these kinds of comments, he’s relying on a backstop of insecure white-male-supremacy complicit women to reinforce them by parroting hot garbage about not feeling “complete” until they became mothers. But this time, I was relieved to see that a lot more of us mothers pushed back on the idiocy. 

We are all so sick of being judged for what we do and how, when, and where we do it, that we rolled our eyes as one. (At least in my neck of the internet.) You love to see it.

Pre-S over.

Let’s move on to something completely different. 

…

On Tuesday I drove my mother and me two hours to see her older sister—my aunt—who lives in a nursing home. She is 91 now, and she has good days and bad days. The last couple of visits have been bad days, but Tuesday was a good day. She was more aware and engaged than I’ve seen her in a few months. And she was. Pissed. Off. 

For one thing, my mother and I were late, and she did not appreciate that. For another, she couldn’t call us to ask if we were still coming because she’d lost her cellphone, and she was pissed about that, too. The rooms no longer have land lines, so her cellphone is her line to the outside world, and either someone took it with her dinner tray, or it got lost in her bed linens. 

I started opening the drawers in her nightstand to see if the cellphone might be hiding there, and that’s when I came across a small photo album I didn’t recognize.

I walked around the bed to where my aunt was sitting in her wheelchair and showed her the album. 

“Oh,” she said, “I thought I had lost it. I used to carry it in my purse.” 

Here are few highlights: 

My aunt and her father, my grandfather. This is somewhere in Budapest, (which is where my family is from). I think it’s 1955 or so here. My aunt would be 22. 

Here is my great-grandmother:

My great-grandmother left an inscription with a date, so I know this one was taken in April 1957. She mailed the photo from Hungary to my family, who had just arrived in Los Angeles in January. She would have been about 70 here.  

I always think of the women in my matrilineal line as insistent smilers for photos. My mother taught me from birth to smile for every photo whether I wanted to or not, which is one of the reasons I think I struggle so much with posing for photographs now.

Here’s a photo of my grandfather, grandmother, and my uncle George from 1955 or so. Of course my grandma is smiling: 

Fast-forward several decades to May of this year. Here is a picture of my aunt on a bad day, not realizing the camera is pointed at her: 

Me, smiling awkwardly.

Here she is a moment later, after noticing the camera: 

So it’s interesting to see my great-grandmother not smiling, though it’s pretty obvious why she’s not smiling: she has no teeth. All of my family had terrible teeth and the ones who moved here spent the next decade or so in the dentist chair, salvaging the teeth they could with complicated bridge work (in the case of my mom), or having most of their teeth pulled and wearing dentures (in the case of my aunt). Maybe that’s why they were so insistent on smiling: they never took their teeth for granted. 

These are the only photos I’ve ever seen of my great-grandmother. Maybe the insistent smiling for photos actually did start with her, maybe there are photos of her smiling with teeth from decades earlier, but we don’t have them. I hold fast to the few details I know about my great-grandmother: she survived two husbands, the first husband was my grandmother’s father, he died in the Flu Epidemic of 1918. 

The photo looks far older than the 1950s, when it was taken. Doesn’t it? Hungary was decades behind the U.S. in terms of clothes, hair, eye, and dental care, and even the quality of the camera with which it was taken. It really shows here. 

I strain to see a resemblance between her and me, but I do recognize the worry lines at the top of the bridge of her nose. It’s the same spot where my lines are also just now becoming permanent. 

…

I used my iPhone to take pictures of these photos, then returned the album to the drawer where I found it. I was tempted to ask my aunt if I could take the album with me, but even if she said yes, I don’t know if she would remember having said yes later. She might just think she lost the album, as she had lost the cellphone, and it might stress her out. 

Anyway, the album’s been in her purse for the last 40 years, and the photos themselves much longer than that. It belongs with her. But I hope she doesn’t lose it.

1. A few weeks ago I saw someone on the internet say “the J.D. is short for Jance Dance” and since then I can no longer refer to him any other way.