Smile

There’s a picture on my desk of Stacie and I embracing in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I stare a those two sun-baked smiling faces throughout my workday, enamored by the love in their eyes, the joy in their smiles. I look at the painted sky, just beginning to fill with the wispy brushstrokes of a distant yet looming summer rain. But the couple in the photo seems not to mind the weather. These familiar characters are caught, literally, in the moment. Clearly enchanted with each other, I’m enchanted by them – this beautiful moment frozen, like innumerable others, in a way that only those of us fortunate enough to live in the last century have had the luxury to enjoy.

This sweltering late-summer day would once have been a fleeting memory, slipping in and out of my mind and growing all the more distorted with each passing day. Yet now it’s pressed flat and tucked neatly behind glass safe keeping, the colors desaturated by an artist’s bias, hopefully not to be lost until long after its characters too have slipped into memory.

What I find so compelling is this – I can look at this photo twenty, forty times a day and at some point it becomes more about the composition, the lighting, my hair, than it really is a glimpse into the history of our life together – but sometimes, like this moment, I remember that I was really there. I can feel the cruel August sun stabbing its way though my shirt. The stained smell of a chlorinated fountain wafts into my nose. I suddenly can feel the magnitude, the sheer size of that place and that moment. Now this time seems more the substance of a legend or fairytale I’ve heard far too many times - a day spoken of an pondered longer than it was actually lived. Captivated by the sweetness of reminiscence, I strain back and hope to find what those two happy people were thinking on that sunny afternoon in Paris.

But that’s the crux of the photo, and perhaps the only sacred part of an image like this… although anyone can gaze at this portrait of our smiling faces, they’ll never be privy to the thoughts, the emotions, the love that we shared in the instant that the shutter oscillated open and closed.