precious pictures

Pictures dominated my spare time last week. It began with a deadline to take advantage of free prints of digital pictures – still in my camera. All I had to do was upload the pictures and sort out the really bad from the mediocre and sort of good shots. Few qualify as fantastic photos, but I always figure better some kind of picture than none at all.

The camera carried nearly half a year of family and personal events captured in color:

– Graduations: cheerful John Deere green and yellow caps and gowns at the granddaughter’s high school graduation, black gowns with colorful hoods for the master’s degree and doctorate in pharmacy.

– The cutest little face of our newest granddaughter all dressed up in pink beneath her shock of hair that refused to lay down.

– Visiting granddaughters in tropical colored shirts sing their Daily Vacation Bible School songs to my father in the nursing home. He watches them – a bit puzzled at their youthful antics and Hawaiian song.

– A summer picnic beside the pond in Michigan where our daughter-in-love carefully grilled the marinated chicken she had prepared.

– My son feeding his baby daughter in her infant seat doing his best to keep her from grabbing and smearing food all over her body. Forget bibs. They strip her down to her diaper and plan a good wash-up after every meal.

 – The summer family reunion in the Smokey Mountains captures children doing crafts, playing with the campfire and exploring the shallow creek bed.
And there in the Smokey, time and again I caught one father after another just standing and watching his child – guarding the toddler splashing in the water, helping the crawling baby stand in the shallowest of creek water or tracking the antics of the older ones floating downstream, ready to jump in and rescue them, if necessary.

All the watchful, fathers caught my eye. I had never realized just how often my sons and son-in-love pull guard duty. Perhaps I noticed last week because the roles reversed for my father and I. An ambulance carried him to the hospital. In the confusion of his illness, he needed constant warnings about the dangers of climbing out of the hospital bed and to not pull on his IV or heart monitor.
Using e-mail and phone calls, I tracked his medical progress for my extended family.
He used to hold me, my sisters and brothers back from danger. But, I could not hold him back from the effects of age and a transient ischemic attack (TIA) which left him drained of his usual booming voice -and weakened his body a bit more. He did not need hospital care as much as he needed time to heal.

He went back to his nursing home. At supper time, his left hand shakily, awkwardly, carried food to his mouth, I reached for his fork and knife to help. He always brushed aside the tidiness of the big towels provided as bibs for meals.  Last week, I aimed to keep the food off his hospital gown and in his mouth.

In the hospital, his insistent "I can do it myself" grab for his cup doused him with ice water.  I made sure to guide subsequent trips of the cup to his mouth. None of it is captured in the year’s digital photo diary, but its fixed forever in my mind as my last memories of him because Wednesday, the once strong guardian of the family, with all his quirks, faded and then quietly passed over to the other side when we weren’t looking.

I went home and pulled out photo albums with pictures of him in better, healthier days – years before a stroke and other TIAs robbed him of his strength and enthusiasm for life. I studied snapshots of him  holding newborn grandchildren, reading to toddlers, rough housing with grade school children, looking over line-ups of his brood and, last year, a rare happy smile as his granddaughter gives him a birthday hug and a grin at our Thanksgiving gathering.
Few of the pictures qualify as fantastic, most are mediocre, but for sure, today I know, it is better to have some kind of picture than none at all.


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