Just a moment
My mom sent me this photo today. She received it from her friend Shel, who, with his wife, was a travel companion of Mom and Dad's. They met (I believe) on a tour of China and have taken several tours together since. Shel is a very talented amateur photographer and is still making his way through the many, many photographs he took on their tour of England, Scotland, and Wales in August--that tour, of course, being the reason Dad was in London when he was diagnosed with leukemia. Anyway, Shel happened upon this one today and sent it to Mom, who sent it to me at my request.
It's so casual, isn't it? Just a couple of tourists, surrounded by a few other tourists, taking a break in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum in August of 2016. They could be any retirees, caught in a moment of rest, planning their next foray among the antiquities. But I see so much more. So many tiny details of this captured moment reveal to me, in heartbreaking clarity, all that I am missing.
For example, the man has a camera slung over his shoulder. It evidences his passion for both photography and technology, and makes me wonder how many beautiful photos he has already snapped on this day alone. Some of them have his wife in them; some are landscapes; some are closeups of flowers in gardens. All of them delight in the world around him.
You can't quite tell, but those pant legs zip off. This man is nothing if not practical. If it gets too hot in Oxford on this summer day, he'll convert his pants to shorts and stow the legs in a backpack (that same backpack that contains a windbreaker and hat, should the weather turn in the opposite direction) or on the tour bus. He was a Boy Scout, and their motto has served him well all his life: Be prepared.
Despite the fact that he is thousands of miles and an entire ocean from home, he manages to look neat and tidy, right down to that crease in his shirt sleeve. His wife ironed that shirt before they left, but he packed it carefully and hung it up as soon as they arrived at the hotel. He wears a plain white undershirt so it doesn't get sweaty, and any excess sweat on his face will get mopped up by the clean white handkerchief he carries in his pocket. Tomorrow's shirt will be similarly plaid and similarly crisp.
That lovely salt-and-pepper hair (that same hair he will lose to chemo in less than a month, but we don't know that yet, do we, viewer?) sticks up a bit in front. Several times today, he will unconsciously run the fingers of his left hand through it, smoothing it down and to the side. When it gets particularly unruly, next time he's in the men's room, he'll take a little black plastic comb out of one of his pockets and tidy it more thoroughly.
The guidebook he reads is probably not dog-eared or wrinkled or creased in any way; if it has a binding, said binding remains intact. If he has found it necessary to make notes in it, he has done so lightly in pencil. The man and his wife have a large library at home, love books, and have instilled a deep respect for them in both their children.
You cannot see his right ankle, but if you could, you'd realize that his left ankle is swollen by comparison. This is due to an issue he has with the lymph glands in that leg; complications from a condition he developed when he and his wife lived in Haiti 45 years before, where he gave inoculations and saved babies from tetanus seizures.
And speaking of his wife, that's her head (with the curly hair inherited by both their children) just beyond his, bent over a map. They sit in the companionable silence borne of decades of marriage. She is the love of his life; he knew it the moment he met her, and they were married less than a year later. They have already begun to make plans for their 50th wedding anniversary, but he will miss it by just over three months.
So yes, it is just a snapshot. It is just a moment--and not even a moment I witnessed. But oh, if I could have it back, what I wouldn't give! What I wouldn't give.
