Reflections

I’ve never kept a journal. Instead, photographs have been the markers with which I delineate memory, reminders of people and places and time itself as it unfolds and envelops the strands of family and friendship, intention and action, purpose and meaning. Many are as familiar as the scar on my finger, nearly invisible now, which summons to mind a boy in a basement, the slip of a knife as he carved a piece of wood, the slice deep into the left index finger as if a sausage had been split by the heat of the grill, the quick well of blood overflowing the wound and dripping down onto a blue jeans-clad leg. That image remains as clear as the day it happened sixty-odd years ago, along with so many others: my brother Mark and me being drawn along the windswept ice of a Michigan lake, the old blanket we held between us catching the frigid gusts; my wife Julie sitting on a lakeside dock in Idaho holding our infant son Hayden close and pointing out to him the fish rising to the hatch on a warm July evening; me wandering in the depth of night and despair from our house at the confluence of two rivers across cold, dry fields and along an empty lane to recover Hayden’s van from the site of his memorial the afternoon before.