“Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Say what you want about social media sites (um, yeah, Facebook), I think it has helped me keep in touch with an astonishing array of friends and family. Especially family. When you’re like me, from a country that’s literally on the other side of the world, that’s not easy to do. No number of cards or letters can ever connect you this way. Well, they could, but chances are your attention span will never be able to stay with the tediousness and excruciatingly slow pace of it all.
My brother posted this old photo the other day for me and several of our cousins. It’s from 1970 and is of our extended family, on my mother’s side. It was taken at the wedding of her oldest sister. It’s an incredibly lovely photograph, where everyone looks absolutely gorgeous and happy, frozen in time. I have looked at those faces over and over again, and though I know them all I’m actually seeing them for the first time.
My parents look wonderful. My mother, in her mod clothes and bob haircut (back row, fourth from left), looks straight out of a scene from ‘Mad Men.’ Dad looks supremely 60s-ish, like a cross between Buddy Holly and Bruce Lee (back row, third from left). My brother, at two years of age, is the cutest, cuddliest toddler ever, and sits in the chair with the newly-wedded aunt. Everyone is dressed fashionably and stunningly well. It’s just like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon moment—”where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average.” I’m seven there, sitting in the front, mugging and posing for the camera. (Which, in itself, is highly unusual; my relatives knew how much I despised photographs. In fact, there’s one floating around the Universe right now where I’m not much older than I was in this photo, sulking up a storm in a photo taken at Christmas.)
That’s why this photo is so terrific. It really was a magical moment, where all the planets aligned, the gods and goddesses smiled at us, and the photographer must have thought, “Holy shit, I’m good.”
Say “Cheese!” Perfect.
Source:
http://jacquiewee.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/photograph/