Ready to Go
Sometimes you photograph a moment, an event, a sight seen, with a level of intention that borders on obsessive. After all, many many postcards of the Taj Mahal exist; why would your little iPhone photo be any better? But it is. Because it’s yours, and even if your particular shot doesn’t turn out to have anything to add to the public discourse on a famous, ancient monument, it has your memory infused indelibly into it, the smells and sounds you heard as you lined up the horizon. The choices you made to get there. It’s better because it’s yours.
Other times, you snap a photo without thinking too much about it. Laughing, looking into the sun, unsure of what the camera will even capture. It’s 50-50 that it will be deleted as soon as you get inside and can actually see what’s on your phone’s screen. But it might capture a moment you’d have otherwise forgotten in a week. It might capture a moment of joy, and of choosing a direction in life you’re glad to have taken, in a moment you had no idea you were making a choice. This is a photo like that.
I’d pulled my then-new station wagon into the circular gravel driveway of the house where my friend was staying for the summer while her new house was being built nearby. I’d been driving home from my then-annual summertime trip to see family in Indiana, my car loaded with dirty laundry and antiques, rhubarb pie and castoffs from the basements of aunts and grandmas. I’d finally found a schoolhouse map that was just right, in the un-air-conditioned attic of one of my top-three antiques shops in Chesterton, Indiana, and if I laid it just so at a slight diagonal on top of everything else I’d crammed in the way back of my VW wagon, it could fit and only poke the back of my elbow a little.
(A note about that map: I love that map. It’s not a map of a place; it’s a map of every place. It’s an illustrated guide to geographical terms, and in the kind of soft, ochre pastel-smudges of good classic National Parks signage, it displays a veritable heaven and hell of volcanoes active and dormant, icebergs, fields, fjords, slopes, and crags. It’s mounted on little copper rollers, copper just like Martha Stewart’s and Julia Child’s copper pots and pans I dreamed of for my own kitchen, never suspecting that one day TJ Maxx would deliver on that dream in spades. The map is exactly the length it needed to be to fill the spot in my hallway I hoped it would fill. I pass by it 1,000 times a day and sometimes do not stop to fully appreciate it, but when I do, I can’t believe it’s mine.)
It had been a typical summer’s journey to Indiana and back, and I was thrilled to hurtle home, alone, in my little station wagon, unpack my car, and sleep in my own bed. Midway through my drive, my phone pinged: my friend wondered if I was home yet, and if I wanted to come by for a swim and a catch-up.
This is one of the parts the photo makes me remember: I said yes. Typically, I’d have said no. I’d have felt a stronger need to stick with the plan, get home, unpack, clean things, buy groceries, be a good little adult, adulting proficiently in the adult terrarium habitat she designed and decorated for herself. But, there was something about the day. Bright blue, billowing clouds, trees greening greenly along the highway. There was something about summer trips back to family, the endless quibbles and decisions of where and how best to feed/appease everyone. There was something about how free I felt, on my own again, my swimsuit somewhere in a suitcase in the back of my car, and some clean underwear, too, for after the pool. There was something about that map, that map of everywhere and nowhere all at once. So I said yes.
I pulled into the driveway, and the cavalcade of elderly, fluffy white dogs my friend was pupsitting for the summer bounded out to greet me. They moved in a pack, because they were dogs, but also because if you tallied up the remaining viable limbs, ears, and eyes between the four of them, you’d just about arrive at one solid, fully-functional dog. The brains of the operation hung back; the brawn of the operation can be seen here in this photo, bounding blindly in the grass as I searched for my swimsuit, still damp from the highway hotel the night before, swaddled in a plastic shopping bag. That evening as I gathered myself up to go, the lavender light of summer dusk hanging behind the evergreens all around us, as my friend and I said our goodbyes and I wedged my swimsuit and my leftover enchiladas and the half-empty bottle of champagne from our mimosas that she insisted I take with me into the dregs of available space in the back, the dog would bound his way into the passenger seat and paddle his paws on the dashboard, as triumphant as he was entirely unaware of where he flung his tiny, old body into space.
When I look back at old photos, some are much more recent than I realize. They seem out of time. I can remember the snippet of a moment I was capturing, and in it, I felt older, wimpier, dumpier, sadder, fatter, angrier, more nervous, less brave than I feel now. It feels like a moment from Before, before I became the me I know now, who knows the yous who I know now. But some photos, like this one, I can’t believe are from so long ago, from a time truly before I had the adventures and lived the experiences that made me the me I know now. I really wasn’t me yet, when I snapped that photo of that silly dog in the sunshine. But in so doing, I was unwittingly choosing to become me, a me who deviated from the plan if I knew my swimsuit was in the back. A me who had a map to the whole, unexplored terrain of the earth in her car, and the map was as grand, as washed in the tones of a golden sunset, as unreal as the adventures would turn out to be.
I remember I was wearing my grass-green linen shirt, or maybe I wasn’t, but the feeling that I was wearing it is more true than anything else. Jeans that didn’t pinch anywhere and sandals worn in just right for my feet. Just after I took that picture, and my friend shooed the dog back to his pack so that we could come in and laugh and swim and float in the sunshine of an August afternoon, I slid my phone into my jeans pocket and looked down to pick up the plastic bag. And there it was: The four-leaf clover I’d never managed to find before, not as a kid, no matter how hard I’d looked. My first four-leaf clover. Quietly, quickly, I plucked it out of the grass and laid it in the car’s cupholder. I wouldn’t lose it. I still have it, tucked inside my jewelry box. No wonder that rascally dog jumped into my passenger seat at dusk, waggling and licking and eager, reluctant to be shooed back into his life: I had a four-leaf clover and a map of the uncharted world in my backseat, poking me in the elbow. I was ready to go.
