Little Leif in Wolframs-Eschenbach

I love this whimsical photo of Leif. He was rarely coquettish like this. He had a great smile, and liked to act silly, but was often serious. This is an unusual. It wasn't windy, so his hair just flew that way when he quickly put his head on the side. I was lucky to catch it.

The picture was taken in the town of Wolframs-Eschenbach, near Ansbach, in August 1977. Leif was two-and-a-half years old. At the time, we had just moved to Germany and were living in Fuerth, next to Nurnberg, and this was a day trip. However, a year later we lived closer to this down when we lived in Sachsen bei Ansbach. It's a quaint town with a lot of medieval architecture still in existence.

The boys enjoyed our outings, as we surely did. 

The Power of Smiles - The Power of Longing

Last Saturday I was going through thousands of digital photos and Peter W. was looking at the slide show of Leif's life on this blog. He said, again, how happy Leif looked, how it was hard to believe what had happened to him, but that you could see the downhill slide in his photos during the last year of his life. I, too, was seeing so many smiling photos of him, and it's easy to get the impression that he really was happy. I've written before about smiles in photos. Most people smile for the camera because that's what they've been taught to do. If they don't, the photographer will tell them to smile, and wait to take the picture until they do. It's not that they are always caught at a spontaneous moment of happiness and delight, or that they are really happy people in those pictures, though sometimes it IS a happy moment. We don't see all those that weren't captured, or all the times before the camera was pointed in their direction or the photographer insisted on a smile.

I've posted some photos of Leif that weren't smiling, though except for the one when he was a kid in Japan having a crying fit, he didn't really look unhappy in the photos . . . pensive, thoughtful, absorbed, perhaps, but not sad or unhappy. I do have some photos of him looking glum or unhappy, though. They aren't my favorite shots, but I am still glad to have them. They are real. Usually, I caught him unaware, or I wanted him to smile and he wouldn't, so I took the picture anyway.

The photo with this post was taken by Peter W. in San Marino in September 1979. Leif was four-and-a-half years old. We were on a trip to Italy in our old Opel Diplomat car, which I'm amazed managed the trip. It was the same trip when we visited Rimini, I think. Leif looks so huggable, but also so kind of intense.

Looking at all the photos induced an intense longing for him, a truly heartwrenching yearning to have him back again. I was overcome by it, and then I decided to think more deeply about the emotion I was feeling and discovered that he was the catalyst, but the yearning was not only for him. It was for that time of our lives. It was for the totality of the experience when our sons were young and we didn't face all these problems, when we had no worries about their adult problems and no memories of Leif's death, when we were together and happy. Peter W. says he would like to go back and do it all again, together. I know what he means. I long for the time when I could hold both my boys in my arms and hug them for all we were worth, when I could tuck them into bed at night and sing to them, a time when I knew that if they were unhappy, it would pass, a time when Peter and I were young and hopeful and optimistic about our future and theirs.

We were so fortunate when our sons were young. They were healthy, intelligent, creative, full of life and fun. Of course, they were rascals, too, and often frustrating, but mostly they were a joy, and that time of our lives was a treasure we can be enormously grateful for. We can be grateful for the smiles, the natural and the posed ones, and we can be grateful for every other expression we preserved on film, even the silly ones. They show who we were. I like that better than what we have become.

Quote from "The Little Prince"

Today as I was straightening up my office, I came across the guest book for our wedding. Inside it was a paper on which I had written a quote from the book, "The Little Prince," by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I no longer have any idea why I wrote it down or what it meant to me at the time, but it is so terribly true.

"It is such a secret place, the land of tears."

Is it ironic that right under the guest book were two cassette tapes which contain a recording of my father's funeral in 1960 and some of his piano compositions? It's undoubtedly a coincidence. They were not "together" in the sense of meaningfully having been placed that way, but they belong together, just as they belong in a thematic way next to the red little metal bucket with the white polka dots that came from Leif's office and holds some of his things.

The land of tears IS a secret place, a place where no one else can really go with us, and from which we can only emerge by ourselves, though often with the help of the love of others.

I'm glad I found this today and not three years ago. Today I can say that I do not live in the land of tears. Today I can smile.

Not Always a Happy Child

Peter W. remarked to me yesterday that when he looks at this blog, he sees that Leif had such a good life as a child, was such a happy child. I answered that one reason it looks that way is that we are usually likely to photograph people when they are smiling and happy, so that's not always an accurate picture of the rest of their lives.

Leif did have a good childhood, but he wasn't always smiling and happy. Like any child he had his ups and downs, disappointments and frustrations. I photographed some of those moments, too, and I have pictures of him looking serious, contemplative, bewildered, pouting, and a variety of other expressions, especially when he wasn't really aware of the camera with someone telling him to smile. When you think about it, why do people have to tell us to smile in photographs? Because we want photos of people smiling. They are more pleasing, generally. However, if it was natural to smile for the camera, or we felt like doing it, no one would have to tell us to.

Leif had the usual assortment of childhood tantrums, upsets, and hurt feelings, though as he grew, he was more and more self-contained and unlikely to reveal much about them. When he became a man, he had almost completely erased showing much emotion or allowing his hurt or misery, or even anger, to show, though he felt them deeply.

As an adult, he took many self portrait shots and usually was not smiling in them. I've posted some of them here. Although I like posting the childhood photos of Leif that show him happy, even joyous, perhaps in the interests of a more well-rounded view of him, I should post some others, like the one above.

This shot was taken of Leif in the backyard of our old stone house in Manhattan, Kansas, in July 1976, shortly before we moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. He was one-and-a-half years old. He's climbing onto the glider on our swingset. Little mister adventurous, barefoot and all. He looks so serious!

Leif and Nikko - Thanksgiving 1995 - Age 20

Today would have been Leif and Nikko's fourteenth wedding anniversary if their marriage had lasted. Even though it didn't work out, they still cared about each other and stayed in contact. Leif was proud of her military service. He would wish her well now, as she prepares for a new assignment, and so do we.

I think this photo of them was taken at the family Thanksgiving celebration at my mother's house on Pottawatomie Street in Manhattan, Kansas, in November 1995, shortly after they were married.

He was only twenty years old when they were married, too young to be ready, but so much wanting love. They were divorced in October 2002.

I wish I could have continued to see that radiant, rascally smile on Leif's face.

Leif at Fourteen - The Sudden Change From Boy to Young Man

When Leif was thirteen, he shot up in height to 6' 1", towering over his classmates, and thinned out to a slim figure that was striking. Unlike most boys, he was already shaving by that time, and his sudden puberty also brought with it a terrible case of acne. He was a handsome kid, even with the acne, and he seemed to take everything in stride. He never talked to us about any difficulties of growing up so fast physically, or mentioned worrying about the acne. It wasn't until years after he was a grown man that he told me that some of the kids in his junior high called him "pizza face," and that had hurt him and his self esteem to the point where, even all those years later, he felt women wouldn't be interested in him because of it. He was shy about approaching girls and women, and as an adult he would try to get to know women well by email, phone and texting before meeting them in person, to try to form a relationship before they would see him. And yet, he also professed to have good self-esteem and did have a high opinion of his mental abilities.

I read once that for most of us, our self-image is formed in high school, and that we have a hard time changing it or shaking it off long years after it is no longer appropriate. I don't know whether it is true, but I do think there is certainly a residual undercurrent of that, of what we thought we were at that time as we were coming into young adulthood, and it probably was true for Leif, too.

This photo, taken in the living room of our quarters at Fort Sheridan, Illinois is one of very few that show Leif's acne, and yet look at that glowing, dazzling smile! Leif had the greatest smile, if you could get him to let it go. He contained his emotions very carefully, and of often you'd get a half smile, a bemused look, not the full force smile that was so wonderful. I don't know who took this photo. It might have been me, but I don't recall having seen it until I found it in his photo album after he died. It was taken with his camera. I wish I knew the occasion on which it was taken. I wish I could see that smile again.

Leif Garretson 2003 Photo

I love this photo because it shows the devilish grin and dimples Leif had, and really happy smiling eyes, something I saw less frequently in the past two years. This is how I want to remember him.