Where We Came From

(That's my mother, first girl on the left, shortly before the family moved from Taiwan to Brazil)

Pictures are invaluable, probably because our own brains don't make them. Storage takes space, even in human memory, and so our efficient brains save only fragments. Thus, every time we "remember" something, we are really piecing together the fragments into a completely new picture, each time filling in the blanks with whatever information and inferences seem most likely at that moment. So it is that, the older I get, the more unreliable my memories of my childhood.

I was raised by young parents. Logically, I know this. In my earliest memories, they must have been younger than I am now, but my mind tends to misremember them as older, filling in the early gaps of memory with more contemporary data. How wonderful, then, that someone had the foresight to take some pictures, so that I might have my memory refuted by reliable evidence that they were once young, their lives still ahead of them, the seeds of their greatness still growing within them.

(My mother and her father)

My sister Michelle recently found a trove of family pictures, each one a new discovery: Here is Dad, a tow-headed little boy in a hand-sewn Halloween costume. Here is Mom, a bright young woman full of Brazilian joie de vivre. Here they are together, newly married, each a complement to the other:

In this life our parents are ever ahead of us, never to be caught, and so we are denied the opportunity to fully know them as peers and contemporaries, courageously walking the labyrinth as we do. Mortality, lived in a single direction, obscures our true selves like a fog, making more poignant those hopeful words of Paul:

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Corinthians 13: 12)

In these old pictures, I see my parents and know them better than I did before. And look at her, my young mother! Isn't she beautiful?

(Me, Mom and my big brother Bob)