I would sit at the kitchen table, a clean, unlined sheet of paper in front of me, fountain pen in hand and I would practice writing my letters. M and N, the lower case r with its slanted rooftop and q with is quirky, connective tail. I loved the flow and link of letters on cold, white paper and I felt the challenge my father made; write in straight lines without a liner under the paper.
I would write my Palmer perfect letters, quite content in the action, then I would let the letters flow in the older script my Daddy used. He had such elegant penmanship that spoke of a different era. I would attempt to copy his signature, not for nefarious reasons. I was much too timid to assume I could forge his signature and, if nothing else, I was, and am still an honest girl.
Sometimes, my letters would morph from English to Greek. Penelope looks much more romantic in Greek, with my own flair of course, but Daddy’s flair, in either language, was special and evasive to me.
So it was that while recently sorting through old photos, I came across a little album and some loose photos of my parents during World War II. Daddy was stationed in San Diego during the war. Ma saved money from the several jobs she had along with money Daddy sent home until she had enough to take the long train ride from Union Station in Chicago to sunny California. I love looking at these photos. My parents, a young, married couple, together for a short while in wartime. Their happy faces and love for each shines through in these photos and see so much of myself and my sister, our children and grandchildren in their faces.
On the back of the photos is the other recognizable trait of my father; his handwriting. How fortunate we are that Daddy, in his flowing script, documented such moments with dates, locations, and brief descriptions.
Our own little family has been to La Jolla, California. We were there in 1993, almost 50 years after my mom and dad were there. We were, as they were, at Seal Beach, wading in the same big, blue ocean and walking along the same shore. I recalled the story of my mother’s long train ride to California, but, at the time, I could not find the shopping bag of photos she had given me. Time passed, I found the photos and put them all in a safe spot, where they rested until this past spring.
My sister, Dottie, and I were going through photos we each had, reminiscing as siblings often do when old photos are brought out. It was a pleasant spring day and our piles of photos, as well as our hearts, were full of memories. One photo appeared that I did not remember. It caught my imagination, as images of the past can sometimes do and was a photo of Ma and Daddy, young and in love, he in uniform, she dressed “to the nines” in La Jolla. They are both looking straight into the camera, smiling, playful. I wondered who took the picture. A friend, I supposed; one of the men who exchanged Christmas cards and newsy letters in the post war years. I wondered if it was the friend of Daddy’s that my mother asked me to write a letter to when my father died.
I love this photo. It tells a sweet and simple story in sepia. It is of my parents when I was barely “a twinkle” in their eyes.
While I love the photo, it is the image super-imposed onto the picture that intrigues me. Another photo, or a negative, left a ghost image of my parents. I can barely make them out. Ma is sitting higher upon the rock. Daddy’s hands are on his knees. I can barely make out their faces. It seems a bit more formal and it is as if they have drifted out to sea to some far-off place, together again – and perfectly scripted.
