Roddy pressed the shutter, which means for once I don't have to guess who's behind the camera. That's a rare enough thing in a our family's photographs — usually I am the one doing the asking, and usually nobody remembers. This time I know: it was Roddy, in November of 2012, and the two of us sat for a portrait in the entry way that had been hastily arranged for that purpose, the light close and warm and doing its best to make us look like we'd worked hard at it.
I want to start the letters here, with this one, because it is a photograph and not just a memory, and I have plenty of both to give you. The memories are the ones I'm setting out to write down — this is just the cover of the book. You were, I think, already in your eighties by the time this was taken, though you would not have let on, and you would not let on now either. Ninety-three years old and doing, as they say, as well as can be accepted expected — I've left that phrase exactly as I first put it down, because I think the stumble says more than the correction would. Nobody's expectations quite keep pace with what actually gets accepted, at ninety-three or any age. You take the days as they arrive and you call it doing fine, and mostly, mercifully, it is true.
I know why I'm starting a series of letters instead of just calling you, I want to save them for myself too. And hopefully as you read them your reflection will make each richer. These are the vignettes — small rooms I keep walking back into. This is the first: a studio, a shutter pressed by someone kind enough to let us both be in the picture at once, and a father who is still, thankfully, right here to receive it.