A Blanker Whiteness of Benighted Snow

There is nothing like this Polaroid 669 film for what I am doing, and it is going, going. . . . I've tried working with the Fuji instant film, but I can't do with it what I am doing here, so there are a very limited number of images left. There have been people holding out hope that Fuji or somebody else would buy the rights to it, but nobody is going to bring it back. If it was a winning proposition, somebody would have done it by now. The Impossible Project is going to make a new instant film using an old Polaroid factory, but it is of the SX-70 type, not the peel apart which I need, that and the old positive/negative film.

It is Saturday. There is a paddleboard race at the beach today sponsored by someone I know. I am thinking of going with my camera and trying some "heroic" portraits with the Polaroid, but as often happens to me, I have a touch of catatonia. I'll tell you more about that some other time. But there are summer storms in the forecast today, and they can be dark, hard and violent.

Still, a morning at the beach with a camera in hand. . . .

* * * * *

Ohio. Relatives. I am greeted as my father's son. But all the boys and girls are growing up. We stay with my father's younger sister and her husband. He had owned a tire recap plant my whole life and was a creased, distasteful man. But he was not treated that way, and in his house, he was kowtowed and catered to. I did not like to be around him, though I had never said anything to my father about this. He was not home much, though, so I'd really had to spend little time with him in my life.

He was my aunt's second husband. She had been married when she was young and had had a son, but her husband had died. Maybe. It was always difficult to tell about my father's family. There seemed to be secrets that nobody talked about but in close quarters and then only by glances and allusions. Don't get me wrong. They were a raucous bunch when they got together, and there was much laughing and drinking and music or singing. But there were secrets shrouded in a darkness I didn't wish to investigate, and I never asked about my aunt's first husband.

When I was younger and my parent's were still married, we would come to Ohio every few years to keep in touch with both sides of the family. My mother's side was safer, all of them having lived outside the cities, mostly in the rural hollers. They were the archetypal "country cousins."

But my father's family was different. They seemed dangerous to me, all of them. They drank and smoked and drove fast cars and motorcycles and had run-ins with the law. Some of my cousins were serious criminals, but that was not something for which they were ever shunned or from which they seemed to be discouraged. Among them, my father was legendary for his strength and courage, and he was admired by all of them. My father was wholesome. He was the family angel.

My aunt had had two more sons with the Recap King, and they were the ones I'd known best, mostly the younger one who was just a year older than I. He was a grinning devil, a likable hoodlum who had learned the ropes from his two older brothers. He was like something from a '50s movie about urban gangs complete with slicked back curly hair, a leather jacket, and those short, black boots. In the brief hours we had spent together in my life, he had taught me to smoke and drink and to lust for women. With him on brief holidays, I'd broken into buildings and run through sloping urban forests evading the police. He had taken me to a spot in those same woods to spy on a fellow making love to a girl on a blanket, the first time I'd actually known what went on in that act. He had informed me about women's anatomy (to my disbelief and minor horror) and taught me to drive a car. And all of that had occurred in a single weekend when I was twelve.

Now he was married and lived in another part of the city, on the outskirts in a new suburban area. He still worked at the recap plant taking over many of the things his father had always done, so he was at work all day and I didn't get to see him much.

But his wife was a beauty, and she liked me right off. And each day, while my father and I were there, she would come by to see me. This did not set well with my aunt, of course, who was aggressive in saying so, but my cousin-in-law was not to be deterred. Each day, she would call to see what we were doing that day, and she would come to sit with me and talk. It was only that, but it was more than that, too, for there was a longing in her that was palpable. I did not think that it was merely me for which she longed, but for what I represented, something outside her married life and the sameness of friends and the old, tired routines. I was a college boy and did not work in a recap plant and by now she knew what life would be like, knew without knowing she would cook and clean and have children, knew that she would end up like my aunt.

I had never thought about my father's family before. I had only felt them. They had been a colorful break from our family routine, something larger, I thought, more experienced and fun. But now I could remember my mother's reticence about them. She did not like them, though she rarely expressed this attitude, and she did not want me to be like them. And now, unlike any one of them, I was in college, halfway through, and sitting with my cousin's wife, I began to understand what my mother had not, perhaps had not been able to, articulate. Nor, perhaps, could my cousin's wife. But when we talked, her voice became soft as her face relaxed, and she would drift, I think, as in a dream, talking and smiling and floating away.

One morning, I woke up in the attic bedroom where my father and I were sleeping, and looked out the window to see a fresh whiteness not yet sullied by footprints or car tracks, a dreamy, picture book snow that softened the corners and edges of all things. I sat long without moving trying to memorize the scene before it was spoiled by the day.