Three years ago John, our son Lukas, and his wife Amy knew something that I did not. Which was how much I would enjoy having a screen saver of our photographs in the living room. A box arrived on a brown truck. It was tall, and wide and narrow. John hoisted the flat screen up above the fireplace, bracing it to the wall. Every day since, I have gazed at the images that span eighty years. There are ones of my parents, as well as John's, who are all gone now. Pictures of graduations, birthdays, vacations at the beach, weddings, Christmases all flutter by in parade. 

 

The program that determines what appears when is called random cascade, but I am not fooled. It does things on purpose. Like placing a picture of my mother with brown curls and a coy smile when she was dating my father next to one of her with snowy hair and chalk white skin. Or pairing up a photo of me kissing my infant son, next to one of him being kissed by his wife in New Zealand thirty five years later. 

 

We mostly take pictures on good days, but I was there. I remember. In between, before, and beside the smiling selfies there were hard times. Painful times. Like the image of Benjamin as a baby, before the word autism was firmly ensconced into Odhner vocabulary. Or the picture of my parents having dinner at a restaurant overlooking the Long Island Sound, right after another manic episode. Or one of my father giving a speech at our engagement party, a few years before he started tugging an oxygen tank around. Or our five oldest kids traipsing across Europe, exploring castles in Scotland, dancing in Berlin, hiking in the Alps, and riding bikes in Amsterdam... right after their brother's divorce. Or a shot of John at the airport about to board for Ghana... where he contracted malaria.

 

Watching the images flip and swap places, punches holes in the notion that time is strictly linear. Inflexible. Last month and last century are less segmented and more like facets in a three dimensional prism. The process thins the lines between infancy and adulthood, before and after. It shifts my perspective from a periscope to a panorama.

 

I love seeing my pictures. I imagine that you do too. Perhaps this weekend you will pull the albums off the high shelf, or tug your phone out of your pocket and scroll through the galleries. Seeing those images floating by helps to lift us out of the treadmill of time. 

 

"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways Mine. As the heavens are above the earth so My ways are above yours." Isaiah 55

 

In that moment my perspective stretches to become taller. Wider. Less narrow.