“The Life of Lenny” - May 7, 1984
Wednesday, December 30, 2020
Okay, so to say I was anxious for the arrival of “The Wolverine” is an understatement. I spent way too long sitting in my favorite chair by the front window, where I had a clear view of the path up to the front steps of the house. And I clearly knew that it was not scheduled to arrive until tomorrow yet part of me was hoping for a surprise. Amazon don’t play that, tho. No drone hovered overhead before gently gliding down from the sky, emerging from the grey clouds or anything…
And so I decided I would look to some of my own images. I went over to the lead glass built-in shelves in what we refer to as “the Maplewood room”, although it is decked out in cedar wood…Anyway, I carefully pulled the glass doors of the shelf and took out a red floppy binder that serves as a photo album. And I did so with purpose. There was this one specific Polaroid picture that I wanted to find and scan and thereby preserve. I was starting to understand how much doing so mattered. OG and I survived two years of back to back floods of our last house, thanks to hurricanes Irene and Sandy. Besides, the Polaroid was one of only a few pictures of just me & Lenny.
As I was flipping through my past, I started to get a little nervous as I made it halfway through the binder and hadn’t yet seen the photo. And then on one page, I saw it: a blank space where I knew the photo had been. I remember seeing it in between two other images. It was gone. I tried to reassure myself that I was the only person who accessed the darned album and that I obviously had taken it out for some reason. The photos were held in by a plastic slip so it is unlikely that it slid out. But as soon as I had calmed myself down, it only took a moment for my anxiety to return. Where had I put that Polaroid?
And so I started down the rabbit hole of digging around in plastic bins in the attic storage closets. I ended up going down memory lane but at the end of it, there was no Polaroid. But I did find a Diary that belonged to me during my 8th year of life. I was underwhelmed at first, realizing that I had barely managed to fill 30% of the object with actual writing. There were several pictures hidden in between faded pink paper with hearts on them. But not a lot writing and boy did my spelling suck. But I digress. What I found interesting is that the diary was actually given to me as a birthday gift and I had decided to write five little narratives about myself & my immediate family members. But before I even told my story, I composed, “The Life of Lenny” (see image above). Lenny was the first person I wanted to write about. The people who mattered to me in my very young life were my parents, my brother and Lenny.
Over an hour of digging later, I still had not found the Polaroid of me in pig tails, sitting in Lenny’s lap, his large hand protectively resting on my belly. We were both smiling. But I noticed that all in all of the photos taken of me in 1991, even 1992 (two years after he died) — I am not smiling.
