Perms, Pictures, and then Death

The lunch hour is done at work and I am starting to clean up the tables in the dining room. Their is still a group of 3 residents and 1 private aide sitting at the table closest to the serving kitchen door. I overhear one of the residents talking about setting up an appointment with our in house beautician for a perm. She tells the private aide of the other resident that she doesn't remember when the last time she had her hair permed. She states that her hair never holds a perm for more that about 3 weeks anyway. The private aide says, " Oh, I know what you mean. Look at my hair. I get a perm and it looks good for a couple of weeks and then it starts to look like this". The aide grabs onto a lock of her hair and it is dried out and kinky. I come back into the room after putting all the lunch dishes in the cart and I start to tell them of my disaster of a perm experience that I had, Thanks to my mother. When I was in second grade my mother decided to give me one of those lilt home perms right before the day of school pictures. She left it on for too long. It turned my hair into a mound of dried out frizz. So the next morning, she puts my frizzed out mess into two ponytails. My hair now looks like two frizzed out poofballs. One on each side of my head. She then tells me to make sure that I don't smile (my two front teeth were missing) for the picture. I go off to school upset about my ugly frizzball hair determined not to smile. When I sit down in the photographer's chair, he starts telling my a funny story. Needless to say, I started laughing. What happened next left me horrified. You guessed it, he snapped the picture. The four ladies were laughing hysterically in the dining room. I proceeded to tell them of the time in middle school when I was about twelve. I was sitting at my desk and all of a sudden my male teacher walks up to my desk and throws down this dreaded picture of mine onto my desk. He said to me, "who is this adorable little girl". My face turned eight shades of red as I hurried to put the frizzball picture in my purse before any of my classmates could see it. Of course, when the teacher walked away all the kids around my desk kept asking me what the teacher had given me. I was truely mortified. The residents that are still sitting at the table begin to discuss pictures from their past. Everyone is laughing and having a good time. The private aid starts to talk of her son missing school during alot of his picture days because he hated to get his picture taken. She also tells about how there is not many pictures of her as a child because her mother never really bothered to take too many pictures. I tell everyone that I have tons of pictures of my kids, grandkid, and of the family. My husband always is threatening to shoot Kodak. Then it happens. Laughter turns into sadness as I try to relate to the private aide's lack of pictures. I did not intend for the topic of conversation to change to this, but it just came out. I tell the ladies that I think that there is a psychological reason behind my obsession with taking pictures in every phase of the children's lives. You see, my mother had plenty of pictures of me and my older brother as we were the first boy and girl. But as the family size increased, the picture taking faded. There was only about eight pictures of my brother (who was the fourth child). My father told my mother early on in the year of 1966 that they couldn't afford to have studio pictures taken of him when she had asked him about it. Well, one day a photographer came to the house photography supplies in hand and was giving special deals on pictures that day. He took the photos right at the house and you didn't have to go to the studio or anything like that. Well my mother decided to have the pictures taken, even though she new that my dad would be upset and probably not let her purchase any of them. The man took a picture of me and my two brothers and then a picture of little Jeffrey by himself. A short time after these pictures were taken, we had a house fire and my little brother received 3rd degree burns over 70% of his body. Basically everything but his face. (Perhap someday I'll write about this incident, but today is not that day.) The room becomes very quiet. No one is talking or commenting. Everyone's eyes in the dining room are fixated on me as I continue the story from my past. These last pictures were delivered to the house after my little brother's death about three weeks later. As I am telling the ladies of this, tears are welling up in my eyes. Goosebumps fill my arms and I can barely get the words out. I tell them how sad it is that we only have about eight snapshots and these last pictures taken by the photographer that day to remember him by. I give the residents and the private aide my annalistic view of the reasoning behind my deep seated need for taking so many pictures of my loved ones. Somewhere deep down inside me I felt if I had alot of pictures of my children, nothing bad like this would ever happen to them. I choked up. I could no longer speak. I quietly left the dining room and returned to the serving kitchen to finish my chores. The residents got up to leave. Everyone was silent just as if they were leaving a church service.

Jeffrey died in 1966. After forty years, I still miss him and I think of him every day. When I sit in my chair, I always look up at the last photo taken of the three of us that hangs on the "hall of pictures" (that's what my kids call the hallway that leads to the bedrooms) and wonder; What would he have looked like now? What kind of man would he have become if he only had a chance at life? I named my number 2 son Jeffrey in memory of him. I also bonded with my husband's little brother as if he were my own. It's like he is filling a void in my life for the little brother I lost. You see, my brother-in-law was only nine years old when my husband and I married. It's strange now that I'm sitting here writing of this. It all started with a discussion of perms, then pictures, then it ended up a discussion about death and despair.