My younger sister is marrying in less than a month and I’ve been asked to make a slideshow of photographs for the reception (a project which, because it requires that I access the traditional aesthetic and emotional sensibilities of others and not inject my own, is more challenging than I would have thought).
Seeing photographs of my sister through the years is affecting in a way I hadn’t expected. Aside from being moved by how delightful she has always been, I am confronted with documentary evidence of how absent I was as an older sibling, how little of her life I involved myself in, how self-centered I was.
(Superheros with the coolest birdcage in history).
In photos like these three, we are visibly close and I can even detect support for my father’s often-repeated claim that she looked up to me, a prospect I find hard to imagine as it’s always been clear to me that one of us is a disaster and the other a healthy, whole human.
But there are no such photos as these from my adolescence, as I was simply too cold, too angry, too stupid, too deranged to be anything but a source of difficulties for her. She’s never held it against me, and we’re closer now than we’ve been, but I recognize that I was not a very good brother to her.
(Commandos; note pinko hat).
Nothing is more complex than the dynamics of a family, and nothing is harder to clearly contemplate. But why waste time on the past? I suppose all there is to be done is a better job in the future.
