Anemonia Keeps Me Awake

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

~~Richter

[The Berlew Family Reunion. Orange, PA. September 6, 1926. Photo: Egan Family Archives.]

I don’t think it rained that day. There are no clouds in the sky. I should know. I’ve crawled inside this photo more than once over the years.

One afternoon, in early September 1926, a photographer from Wilkes-Barre, set up his tripod and secured his camera (equipped with a panoramic lens) on a lawn in Orange, PA. I can imagine all the cajoling, yelling and flaring tempers that filled the air that day. To get all those people to line up and be still. The children want to run and push each other. An uncle wants to finish a mug of beer. An aunt needs to check her hair. A young woman needs to straighten out her dress. A twelve-year old boy needs to find a place to sit.

Somewhere in my apartment is a rolled up photograph. It is cracked with age. Yesterday I decided I needed to look at the photo again. I couldn’t find it. I looked in corners and alcoves. No luck. But I recall seeing it once in another format. Yes. It was on a CD that my brother, Dan, put together.

And there was the photo. The Berlew Family Reunion.

Berlew was my grandmother’s maiden name. She married Michael Egan on June 18, 1908. My cousin Elaine informed me that it was an evening ceremony.

Ever since my father showed the photograph to me, strange things began to happen. I returned to the photo time and again. I was drawn into the scene. I found myself on that lawn, tweaking the daisies as I attempted to sit beside my father. I looked at the faces, faces of those with whom I shared a bit of DNA. But, those were days, years ago, that I saw these relations as old people (and they were). As I look at this photo now, as someone approaching his 77th year, I see things in this scene that I missed as a young man.

There are approximately sixty-two people on the lawn that day in September. I look closely at the faces. Very few of them are smiling. Very few. They are a hard-working crowd. You can see that in their faces. A boy sitting on the ground, thinking about something, was smiling. I don’t know who he is, but I will guarantee that he is now buried in a rural cemetery, somewhere to the west of Scranton, somewhere in the rolling hills of the northern flanks of the Poconos. A smirk on my father’s face, a sly grin on the face of an older man. I look at my grandparents. My grandfather, Michael, looks stern and grim. My grandmother’s face, her bobbed hair falling over her forehead, is full of mystery and hidden charm.

[A detail of the lead photo. My grandparents are in the last row at far right. Photo: Egan Family Archives.]

I find my father. He’s seated on the grass at the left end of the gathering. He is twelve years old. There is an attractive young woman sitting at the far left end of the photograph. Is that her mother holding her child? She looks enigmatic and sad.

[Detail of the lead photo. My father is seated, third from the left. He’s wearing a vest and dark tie. He is twelve years old. Photo: Egan Family Archives.]

Sometimes I would imagine that if I could enter this photograph, I would sit down next to my father. I would talk to him. Maybe we would play catch. Maybe he wouldn’t see me. I don’t know how things like that work. But I wouldn’t interfere with him in any way. He has to be allowed to go on his way and eventually, twenty-one years from that afternoon in Orange, PA, he will become a father to his fourth son. That would be me. Nothing has to harm him. He must make that date to ensure my being born.

This overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a time and a place that one has never been to is called Anemonia. You won’t find it in most dictionaries. It’s one of those forgotten words.

I can’t turn away from the faces. These folks are now destined to remain trapped in a black and white emulsion. The paper photograph is cracked. But these people were surrounded by color and music, love and life. They hear the birds sing and the dogs bark. The child laugh and a radio is playing Paul Whiteman’s Birth of the Blues. They are not just images, they live. They live because I’m looking at them. Perceiving them. Talking about them.

I wish I had my father draw a chart of whom these people were. I knew a few of those in the photo, taken so many years ago. I can name these–Aunt Reen, Uncle Ford–but that’s about all. So many I do not know, but who are joined to me by genetics. It’s been written that reveling in the past is a waste of time. We should stay in the present. Anticipate the future. But, it is not wasted time to try and recapture a moment, a century ago, when people met, families gathered, to enjoy each other.

A suggestion, dear readers: Go into that old trunk. The shelf in the closet. The drawer. Find an old photo. Try to insert yourself into the scene. Listen. Smell the air. Feel the grass.

Is there an image of a couple who will become your father or mother? Pay attention to them. They will create you…