Once I started down the path of playing around with the bits of analog photography kit about a week ago, I realized that consciously or not, I was setting myself up for today. Celebrating Father’s Day for the first time without Dad, by looking through his eyes at the world in the shape of taking out the Vivitar lens he’d given to me a couple of years before his death. It’s been emotional, but not sad, and I don’t want you to be sad.
Think about this, instead. As children, we rarely look at our parents as fully-formed humans outside of the role they play in our lives. Parents are not just adults. They are defined by a different word, fitted into ressponsibilities they may have felt wholly unprepared for and yet, most of them, they try very hard to do what needs to be done for their children. My Dad certainly did. Mom and Dad were married at ages 18 and 19, Dad was just twenty when I came along, and the family story is that he enlisted in the Air Force when the job he’d planned to support his bride and their unborn child with evaporated. The two of them had been traveling to that job (Dad was going to be a park ranger at a National Forest, a job he would have been magnificently suited for) when they received news there was a hiring freeze and the funding for the job was gone. Dad signed up for the USAF there where his father was serving at the SAC base. The Air Force, looking at the dwindling end of the Vietnam war, and a very pregnant wife, deferred Dad’s enlistment long enough for me to make my arrival into the world.
Dad spent the next forty-two years (until health forced him to retire) working hard at whatever jobs he could rustle up (which included the ten years he served in the Air Force) in order to support all of us. Three daughters, one of them profoundly handicapped from birth. He worked long hours, sometimes very far from home, and he never complained that I heard. He gave us what I think of as a good life—sure, we were poorer than church mice, but that’s not an impediment to joy—and he gave me a little cheap camera when I was quite young, because his camera was one of the few hobbies he’d been able to carry with him through all of that time. He shared his love of the vision through a lens with his child. He shot his Canon AE-1 to pieces, wore it out to the point where it could no longer be repaired, and couldn’t afford to replace it, so he wound up with the Minolta 370, and the Vivitar 70-210mm lens that was on it when he handed it over to me. In time, I plan to hand the Minolta and lens down to my son, who has become an avid photographer himself.
It’s been a family thing. Between Dad and my grandma La Vaughn, I grew up around photographers. Not a lot of technical instruction, but encouragement, opportunity, and acceptance of the costs involved. That last is no small thing, given my mother didn’t work outside of the home due in part to my sister and in part to my parents’ dedication to homeschooling us. Sadly, I have very few photos taken by my father, and to the best of my knowledge, none taken by him with this Minolta body and lens. I do have some he took when he borrowed my digital camera back in 2012 to take along with him to a re-enactment (see the first photo in this post). Ironic, that he was living time-travel back to 1740s and shooting a record of it with modern technology. That was Dad. The old and the very new.
I rigged up the Vivitar lens to my Canon R100 body, and took it out into the garden. Dad’s love for gardening and beekeeping is legendary. I grew up in the garden, from before I could walk. Mom talks about putting baby me into a backpack and taking me into the garden. Later on, Dad’s book he studied from and implemented heavily once we were in New Hampshire was Mollison’s Permaculture. I have so many photos of the Farm. I took the lens with me to the Farmer’s Market. Dad loved selling at the markets. He was a gregarious extrovert, and the chance to talk to people, sell them food, and visit with other farmers? he was in heaven.
I’ve been walking around for days now, thinking about what Dad would have photographed, and taking pictures through his eyes. In some ways, this has made me realize just how much of him is in me, that we found the same things appealing. In others, I realize how much of his inner life was set aside for me-the-child so that he could make the money my sisters and I needed for shelter, food, and clothing. I know, from conversations we had in the decade I lived alongside him as an adult on the Farm, and from the last conversations we had during the visit where I realized (even though he did not) he was dying. I know he had no regrets. He laid aside his dreams time and again for his children. I can only hope I can live up to that. I’ll be working more on the gardening book in the near future. It’s not about money. It’s about seeing some of Dad’s theories through to actualization. Gathering fruit from guilds he designed, in a manner of speaking. I’ve taken his ideas and planted, tended, and am seeing the potential. Father, to child, and then down to grandchild…
The camera’s lens captures what is reflected in the windows to the soul.
Today I am thinking more about my dad than myself. (M.L. Flowers 1921-2001)
Dave Freer calls chickens chooks. The pictures are very nice.