Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Years ago, during a visit, my aunt unloaded a box of old photos; they belonged to my grandmother. I recently rediscovered the box rummaging through a closet. For an hour I distracted myself, peering into the faces of relatives and strangers. None of the pictures had names written on the back, but I recognized my mother as a little girl, socks bunched around her ankles; my grandmother’s singing group at Kutztown State College, Uncle Bobby’s at-home wedding. Their smiles are radiant, masking what I know were some difficult years.

With so much of our treasured moments digitized on servers, it seems we’ve lost physical evidence of our lives. Yet, we own thousands more photos of ourselves than our parents and grandparents. Like many, I wonder what will happen to the virtual record of our existence once we depart the earth. Will we be only memorialized on social media? Will our high school graduations, trips with friends to Turks & Caicos, leaping pets with frisbees in their mouths remain frozen on our pages?

Today’s poem conveys how our pictorial records reveal far more than what lies on the surface, sometimes only what time and hindsight can expose as truths.

Home Movies: A Sort of Ode
by Mary Jo Salter

Because it hadn’t seemed enough, 
after a while, to catalogue 
more Christmases, the three-layer cakes
ablaze with birthday candles, the blizzard
Billy took a shovel to, 
Phil’s lawnmower tour of the yard,
the tree forts, the shoot-’em-ups
between the boys in new string ties
and cowboy hats and holsters,
or Mother sticking a bow as big
as Mouseketeer ears in my hair,

my father sometimes turned the gaze
of his camera to subjects more
artistic or universal:
long closeups of a rose’s face;
a real-time sunset (nearly an hour);
what surely were some brilliant autumn
leaves before their colors faded 
to dry beige on the aging film;
a great deal of pacing, at the zoo,
by polar bears and tigers caged, 
he seemed to say, like him.

What happened between him and her
is another story. And just as well
we have no movie of it, only
some unforgiving scowls she gave
through terrifying, ticking silence
when he must have asked her (no
sound track) for a smile.
Still, what I keep yearning for
isn’t those generic cherry
blossoms at their peak, or the brave
daffodil after a snowfall,

it’s the re-run surprise
of the unshuttered, prefab blanks
of windows at the back of the house,
and how the lines of aluminum
siding are scribbled on with meaning 
only for us who lived there;
it’s the pair of elephant bookends
I’d forgotten, with the upraised trunks
like handles, and the books they meant 
to carry in one block to a future
that scattered all of us.

And look: it’s the stoneware mixing bowl 
figured with hand-holding dancers
handed down so many years
ago to my own kitchen, still
valueless, unbroken. Here
she’s happy, teaching us to dye 
the Easter eggs in it, a Grecian
urn of sorts near which—a foster
child of silence and slow time
myself—I smile because she does
and patiently await my turn.

"Home Movies: A Sort of Ode" by Mary Jo Salter. Used by permission of the poet.