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 period never fail to move me. The physical beauty of a child – any child – before seven years or so plays a part, but there is something else too, something easy in the photographic moment, soft in the eyes visible through the screen door in my hand resting on my own shoulder, my fingers as limp and delicate as an Old Master cherub, or in the softness around my brother’s mouth blowing out a dandelion, or my father in his suspenders standing over the tickle of a small white dog, his arms out sideways in delight, my mother by a picnic basket, belly on the grass, feet crossed behind her in the air.

Something in that interval of childhood challenges all current life strategies, some essential quality in those years whose only defense appears to be its lovability – the Fontanel Defense – surrounding young life as delicately as an eggshell, if surrounding it at all. Just for a moment there, a season of pure and exposed beauty.

The full essay here:

Scheherazade – X — The Disney Log Flume