That baby was my dad
My grandmother gave me this photograph yesterday. It was taken in 1939 at Combs-la-Ville, yet another French town I will never visit, at my great aunt's house (seen in background). From left to right: My great-grandmother, my great aunt, her son, my grandfather holding...my dad, my grandmother.
I am just posting this because it is unfathomable to me how I am 23 and my dad, 71, and yet there he is on this picture, barely larger than a schnautzer. And it does not seem real because there is no possible world in which I could have been in that photo. It's not just that I happened to be somewhere else while these reluctantly content people posed for a photographer. It's just impossible for me to have in any way physically apprehended what that grass felt like under my feet, what that house looked like from the other side, and what the smells in the air were that day. And so how can it be real?
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