Milk Man’s Child

My mother insisted I take all my photo albums from the house the last time I visited.

“Why? What am I going to do with them?”

“Well, look at them of course,” she had said.

This idea of looking at photos of the past doesn’t make much sense to me. Photos are not real. You cannot taste or feel anything from them—they are paper. The people in those photos no longer exist; they are not real; they have changed: gotten older, cheaper, or lonelier. I don’t want to be remembered as who I used to be but what I am. And, even that is debatable. We can never know truly “who” we are, just how other perceive us to be.

My mother told me once that she has not one baby picture of herself. “Grandpa and Grandma didn’t have time to take pictures,” she had said.

I have many baby photos. They are me—dark skinned, bug-eyed, thick limped—they called me the milk man’s child. Yet, they are not me at all. Time is what is captured in photos, nothing else.

As we get older photos become more and more important to us as though if we don’t document our life, we never existed.

I’d rather not exist than to be remembered at a shot in time. . . . You want to remember me? Remember my smile in your mind and your mind only. That is where I want to live.