I am looking at a snapshot of my father. It’s one of my favorites. But today I’m looking at it as if I’m seeing it for the first time. It’s one of those pictures that raises more questions than it answers. Just like my father.
He’s dressed in a NASA space suit. Well, not so much “dressed” as standing in front of an actual astronaut space suit that’s propped up and holding its own space helmet in its gloved hand.
Pop is posed behind it, chin propped on the collar of the suit. He’s flashing his signature gap-toothed smile, his eyebrows devilishly arched like Jack Nicholson’s. Long sideburns punctuate the thick, dark hair like groovy exclamation points, with a stubborn cowlick in the center of his forehead. His face is a little shiny and ruddy, probably partly from his Anglo-Saxon roots and partly from a couple of Rob Roys. His gaze is directed at someone standing to the left of whoever is taking the picture. My mother, maybe?
Trying to resolve the image, I absentmindedly press the tip of my finger to my thumb in a futile attempt to make the details more apparent.
I assume the photo was taken in Florida. Since my knowledge of NASA is based largely on the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, I’m pretty sure there’s a NASA there, somewhere near Cocoa Beach where Jeannie’s master found her genie bottle washed up on the sand.
I’m guessing it was taken sometime in the ’70s, when my parents went to Florida with their friends. My father’s best friend was an ophthalmologist and my parents often tagged along with Jack and his wife to medical conferences. I bet this was the trip where they went to Disneyworld.
I’ve never been to Disneyworld. But when Pop fired up the Kodak carousel slide projector in the living room, my siblings and I were transported. We might’ve been the only kids in America who knew about the country bear jamboree, the animatronic presidents and the It’s a Small World After All boat ride through their parents’ vacation slides. The real-life experience remained hidden in celluloid.
Looking at my father smiling in the space suit, I realize this is one of a handful of pictures I have where he is the sole subject — and not the photographer himself.
We joked that he was the Pop-arazzi. He was always pointing his Nikon camera at everyone and everything. Looking at the world through his own unique lens and taking forever to bring it all into focus. A Kodachrome view of a life well lived. My mother was the most patient — if not always most willing — of his subjects, even developing her patented “Ta-da!” method of always looking happy and beautiful in his images of her.
When we were kids, he even had a darkroom upstairs in our house where he would putter for hours, creating an alchemy of high-contrast, black-and-white images of whatever was at hand — our empty back yard, the family cat, a lonely lawn chair, a stack of warped corrugated boxes.
I still have a portrait he shot of me when I was about 6. My father said it was the best photo he ever took. I remember the moment he shot it. I’d been crying because I didn’t want my picture taken. When I look at that picture now, I stare into my own eyes, imagining that I can see my father reflected in them. Me looking at him, looking at me.
I don’t know why there aren’t more pictures of my father. Maybe it was something about the photograph trapping his spirit in silver halide, the unflinching blend of light and shadow revealing more than he wanted us to see.
After he died, in 2019, my family learned that my father had been given up for adoption at birth. In those days, there were secrets that no one shared, and the fact that Pop was adopted was one of them. No one knew. Not even my father.
He grew up believing he was the much beloved only child of adoring parents — my grandparents. And that much was true. But what about the rest?
I wonder if he wondered. I wonder if he knew.
Looking at this photo of my father the astronaut, I hold it carefully by the edges as he always instructed me to do, so as not to leave fingerprints. How important is it really to know?
Not all mysteries are meant to be solved.