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"[Photographs are] not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement."
- Susan Sontag
The Girl on the Swing
Decades later, I can smell the ropes of that swing, feel their coarse texture as I held on tight, twisting them together so I could spin in dizzying circles, sometimes grazing the oak tree near the swing my grandfather had built with a board and ropes attached to a stout branch of that tree. My own private amusement park ride, unrecorded by any camera, but relived - albeit in a much subdued manner - thanks to the wings of my brain's architecture responsible for evoking memories. But I cannot speak to the girl about what she was thinking and can only imagine her shrieks of delight, hi fact she doesn't and will never know I exist, though my adult self acknowledges we share the same DNA.
What did she look like? A five-year-old girl with a laughing face, curly hair in the Shirley Temple style favored at the time,· she wears a gingham pinafore trimmed with lace, lace-cuffed anklets in immaculate white shoes. But no, I couldn't possibly have seen her actual face back then. I must be imagining it, editing the memory, as it were, by splicing in data from a photo taken about the same time and in roughly the same place: my grandparents' summer boarding house in then rural New Jersey. In the framed photo I am sitting on a birch-log bench, delighted to be holding a small dog. Maybe someone had told a particularly funny joke just before clicking the camera.
I retrieve the framed photo from the table on which it's displayed. Charming, but the girl is distant as any photo image and inaccessible to communication as the Girl on the Swing. How do I even know if the Girl on the Bench is indeed myself? Only because my parents long ago identified her as such. Still this two-dimensional girl's image evokes no sense beyond the visual: I cannot, even in a subdued manner, feel the dog's fur or the bench's birch-logs, smell the lilacs in the background, the leather of my white shoes.
Voilà! I realize that I have "stolen" the face in the...