Really, She's Too Young to Even Have Old Photos
Today we were looking though the photo album of Baby Dog’s first week or two. It’s hard to believe that toothless little infant is the same walking talking baby who today insisted that I read her Over in the Meadow a record tolerance-stretching five times in a row. It’s her face in those pictures, you can see that, but the 2005 version of that face is so much more defined and aware. I’m sure a year from now it’ll be just as odd to see how the little girl she’ll be then could ever have been the baby she is today.
posted by PapaDogDuvalier | 10:25 PM
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There will come a time when you will harbor a nagging suspicion that someone, aliens perhaps, have sneaked into your house and planted photographs of someone else's infant, just to convince you that you had a past. Your day-to-day experience of your child will be so immediate, so constant, so vibrant, and so connected but dimly and tenuously to the experiences of yesteryear, that you will be unable to conceive of this person ever being anything other than who she is right here, right now.
I have an eight-year-old who engineers worlds in Lego and greedily devours TinTin and Asterix by the hour. I seem to recall, perhaps in a story someone told me, another one: much shorter, slightly rounder, who dearly loved bantam chickens; quietly, almost shyly, yet oddly proudly, cradling one, surprisingly unprotesting, under one elbow for long stretches while gambolling about the yard. They are one and the same, of course -- and yet the other, indeed many others -- gone, lost beyond all hope of retrieval.
I didn't understand that vignette in Bradbury's Dandelion Wine (the one where the old woman, surrounded by the mementoes of her youth, but in the face of disbelieving children, comes to the conclusion that, no, she was never young, that was some other girl.) the first time I read it. Now I see it in action.
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