Strangers’ Photographs

Over at Pause, Sally Howell Johnson writes beautifully about her reaction to the boxes of photographs in antique stores, the false sense of beauty or perfection created by digital photography, and a quirky family tradition.

But the one thing I cannot bring myself to look at in these stores are the boxes of old photographs. These images of the people’s lives placed in cardboard boxes for total strangers to rifle through disturbs me. I want to buy them all, take them home, fill albums with them.

I love coming across blog posts in which a reader has quoted a passage from one of my books and put his or her on spin on it, using it as a jumping-off point for personal rumination–as Sally Johnson does here with The Year of Fog. I love these glimpses into other people’s lives, love the sense it conveys of reading as a conversation and as a starting point for deeply personal associations.

As a reader, so much of my own buried past comes to surface unexpectedly when I’m reading a book, and I often find myself pausing and marking the page with my finger while I stare off into space, remembering. What I love about Sally’s post–beyond the interesting leaps of thought and the deftness with which she writes about photography as memory–is that I can imagine her setting my book aside for a moment to take her own mental trip back in time. And this makes me feel less lonely about the business of writing.

I went to San Francisco today for a meeting, and realized while I was sitting there that it was the first time in months that I had sat down one-on-one with another person who was not my husband or son. When my son is away for his very brief stints at pre-k, I don’t feel that I can afford the time to sit down with someone and talk. I’m on deadline–I am, in fact, way behind deadline–and the time, it seems, is not my own. Any spare moment must be spent writing, an activity which I do in complete solitude. Sally’s post reminds me that there is a reason for all that alone time, and that ultimately, when a book is in the world, it is part of a conversation; it may reach into people’s minds and lives in a way that I, as a physical person in the world, can never seem to find the time for.

And now, as I check the clock, I realize I must put aside my computer and go pick my son up. And I know I should not allow myself to feel the tug of wanting to write, because, soon, he’s going to be driving himself here and there, and then, he’ll be off at college. Yesterday afternoon, we we went to see Toy Story 3. During the scene in which the mother is standing in her son’s room just before he leaves for college, and the audience was completely silent, my little boy looked over at me and said loudly, “But mommy, when I go away to college, will you stay with me?” Well, yes, I did start bawling right then and there and cry through the rest of the movie. So I remind myself that picking him up and spending the day with him is a privilege, and this book will get written someday…just not today. And I’ll have a lifetime as a writer, but only a few years as mom of a little boy.