I cannot bear to look at old photographs of myself in my 20’s or beyond, or recent ones either. I either look like the prince of nerds or a bullet headed soccer hooligan. Now, with my face giving up to gravity like splashed jelly sliding down a wall, I am grateful for the masks of Covid.
But I do like to look at timeworn photos, the ones whose names no one will know in 10 years, the photographs that go back at least 80 years or more, many well before my parents met. These are the antediluvian images most of us have piling up in albums in closets we rarely open.
Old photographs set up the mysteries of where we came from. Here is my brother’s cheekbone, my sister’s eyes, my curly hair. But that’s only a view of the surface of these faces. There are no answers. The mysteries will always be mysteries. The ones who could answer them are long dead.
Here are my father and mother, shopping with friends, my father’s shirt buttoned all the way to the top to his almost gangster face, a head as solid as a medicine ball, and my mother, hair pulled back, her wonderful smile and eyes better framed that way, gazing openly into the camera.
The first question I have is always, “What were they thinking,” and then “What did they do for the rest of this day,” and then “I wish I could know,” and then “No, let them to their privacy.”
My beloved Aunt Gladys, maybe 3 or 4, who always appeared after each of my mother’s babies were born to lend her strength to whatever needed doing, who was beset by illness all her life. On the back of this photo in my mother’s handwriting: “after having typhoid fever.” Perhaps her sicknesses made her more gentle. Whatever it was, she was a glorified soul.
One of my great grandfathers, a shepherd who emigrated from Austria, word has it, because he wanted nothing to do with the Hapsburg Emperor’s army, here with his arms around 2 of his granddaughters, Elsie on the left, who worked all her life to support her sister and mother, and Gladys. None of his stories were preserved. None of us ever asked our Aunts or mother about his journey, his youth, his life here. 
In that way these photographs are a rebuke to myself. Why didn’t I care enough to ask them? If only I could have stepped aside from my absorption in my youth.
Here are geographies I can see into but cannot access. I can fly above them, but I cannot touch down. My sister and brother and I have hundreds of them that make up lost worlds, the lost worlds each of us must accept but which we can never stop contemplating.
