The Fontanel Defense

An excerpt from an essay on looking through family photos after the death of my parents. I am alone in the attic of my family's summer home.

Photo by Olga Petnyunene on Unsplash

I confess to an almost religious affection for my own image as a child and then, more broadly, to pictures of my brother and my parents as children, and their parents and their parents’ parents as children all the way back, up and around the banks of a river and somewhere back in time well out of sight.

It’s not bewildered infancy I’m thinking of with its fat cheeks, its neck wobbling, its dazed perch on the shoulder. But it’s before the scrunched slugger-face pose on Phillies “Bat Day,” before the handstand skateboard trick, before the model rocket held forward, brandished like a sword. Before the stain and strain of approval, before turning my shoulder angrily from camera to tend the smoky little fire of my adolescence, before the cool tilt of the head and the calculated squint. Before the endless mastering and becoming.

Before all of that.

I’m thinking of the sweet-spot in childhood, something in the interval of the two, and pictures taken in that p…