learning journal 03.28: literary experiments

As I have read and studied essay theory this semester, I have continued to experiment with that               

theory in my own writing. This piece I wrote trying to explore the ambiguity of truth and fact, to    

incorporate what I've learned. This is a current attempt:

Pictured Truth

~I have a black and white photograph of a couple sitting on the porch steps of a white brick house. The young man is sitting in an easy, relaxed position—a bit slouched, both legs bent but one more extended than the other. He is gangly, charming, and holding a ukulele. His plaid button-down hangs loosely on his body, and his jeans are folded up at the cuff, showing his argyle socks and broken-in loafers. His grin probably has more to do with the young woman whose arm is draped around his shoulders than it has to do with the camera. He is looking at the camera, but she isn’t; she is looking at him, and her smile is only for him. Her cheek is resting in her hand, and her knees are drawn nearly up to her chest; where he is gangly she is graceful, and her profile as she looks at him is delicately fine. Her shirt, plaid like his, is paired with white capris and ballet flats; her short wavy hair—which, from what I guess looking at the black-and-white picture—is light brown, and perfectly in place. She adores him.

It’s not only the way she is looking at him that suggests they love each other; he is leaning into her, one of his knees is touching hers ever so slightly. A sense of familiarity seems to exist between them that goes beyond the photograph; I may only think that, however, because the couple pictured are my grandparents, and the familiarity that exists between them now translates into my perception of the photo. They seemed so unaffected by future troubles, troubles that their present selves have born. Their black-and-white forms in this photograph are merely shades of the grandparents I know now; and yet, the shades are as familiar to me as the true, colorful forms I know now and remember from my childhood. I wrote true in the last sentence, something that slipped from my fingers but now seems erroneous: what was true then is just as much true as what is true now—just through a different lens, with a different exposure. My grandma is still graceful but perhaps not as willowy as she is pictured; the way she looks at my grandpa is still admiration but deeper, with a longer history. My grandpa’s crooked smile still exists even though change has altered his once lanky frame. The mischief visible in the picture is still there, though he now has fewer moments of seemingly careless ease.

Careless ease is probably another misconception as true was in the paragraph above. My grandma and grandpa took this picture shortly after being married in 1952, and they are sitting on the porch steps of their first apartment in Atlanta, where my grandpa was stationed in the army. There can’t be too many moments of careless ease in a soldier’s life, especially because shortly after this picture was taken he was deployed to Korea, where he saw and experienced the inexpressible terror of war that I don’t understand and never will. He spoke very little about the war throughout the next few decades; it wasn’t until the past ten years or so that he broke his silence and began telling his war story. He and my grandma wrote hundreds of letters throughout the time he was in the army. At first, they wrote while they were engaged, when he was in training and she was a senior in high school; they then married and moved to Atlanta while he finished he training. They resumed their letter writing again while he was in Korea—so while the rest of the family remained ignorant of details for decades, my grandma knew what he had been through and kept his confidence. So, in reality, her careless ease in this picture likely hid worries of losing her husband, of widowhood, of loneliness. Just looking at this picture alone, it seems like the couple had nary a care in the world; under the surface, though, there is much I could speculate about what was going through their minds. Worry, doubt, fear, anxiety, determination to just hold on, to just have hope.

I realize that what I know of them from my memories and what I know of them from this photograph represent a scant view of their lives together, of their relationship. I assume they clung to each other; I assume he told her about the horror of war; I assume so much that my perception has little chance of coinciding with their true selves and true experiences. I know little through their stories, stories from my dad, stories from my aunts and uncles, but I’m not sure I will ever understand who they were and are—the “truth.”  Identity, though, might never be truth; it is always in flux, and it is always impossible to pin down. So all I can do is cling to the shards of truth, and I will have to be satisfied that I will probably never understand the whole picture, understand their true selves.

           

  Meanwhile, I just realized: I didn’t know my grandpa played the ukulele.