This Is A Photograph (of your father on the front lawn, with no shirt on)

In January 2020 I was at a family dinner at my sister's house when my father, suddenly and without explanation, excused himself from the table while my sister was telling a story. He stood up, breaking her—and everyone else's—concentration, and when she looked up to ask my father where he was going, he suddenly fell over, hitting his head against the wall and sliding down to the dining room floor.

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I jumped from my chair and knelt over my father, cradling his head. As if in a movie, I held his head in one hand and snapped the other in front of his face, yelling for him to wake up. I was sure that he had died, he lay so heavy and limp in my arms, but thankfully, moments later, his eyes, like cherries in a slot machine, quickly dinged forward and he looked around the room without moving his head. He asked what had happened. We told him we didn’t know—he’d just fallen.

When the ambulance arrived a half hour later my father was coherent and assured the EMTs that he must be fine, as he lay on the floor and they removed his shirt to check his vitals. It occurred to me at that moment that I hadn’t seen my father’s chest since the day trips we used to take to Clinton Lake as a child. His chest looked about what I imagined a 65-year-old’s chest would look like—and my father seemed embarrassed to be half naked in front of his family. As do most children, I had forgotten that my dad, like the rest of us, was human. Soon after, the EMTs carried him to the ambulance on a stretcher and took him to the hospital. My youngest nephew, Dylan, too young to understand what was happening, waved goodbye, smiling into the flashing red lights. 

My father was released from the hospital that same evening. He’d accidentally overdosed on a medication used to combat a heart condition called atrial fibrillation, or afib. After seeing him and my mother home, I found myself in their living room, in the same home in which I spent my formative years, going through a box of old family photos that I had somehow never seen: my mother holding a puppy in a wagon next to her sister, Joyce; my sister leaning against a television set with silver dials; my pregnant mother reading a People magazine in a hospital bed while pregnant; etc. 

But among the photos there was one that I had never seen that stood out to me over all the rest: in it, my father, young and shirtless, seemed to almost taunt the camera with his over confident gaze. Illuminated by the West Texas sun, his look seemed to shout at the world beyond the camera, Give me everything you’ve got. It was not lost on me that the photo prominently displayed the same bare chest that I had just seen earlier that evening, giving me an almost side by side visual representation of how it had changed over the past 30 some odd years. In fact, I realized, my father was thirty two years old in the photo, the same age I happened to be at that very moment, sitting cross-legged in my parents’ living room, holding the photograph. And the photo was taken in 1988, the same year that I was born. I felt, in that moment, destined to find this photograph on this night—felt that it had been taken and developed many years ago and left among these other photos specifically in order to cross my path then and there. 

The sick feeling I felt in my stomach when my father suddenly fell earlier that evening I’d imagine isn't much different from the feeling a child of a professional boxer must get watching their father get knocked out by an opponent. I say this because when he fell, I remember immediately thinking that he looked just like a boxer getting knocked out cold by an invisible sucker punch, one that no one—especially him—saw coming. I had just seen a documentary on the infamous fight between Roberto Durán and Sugar Ray Leonard, and that photograph I’d found showed my father, like Durán in the prime of his famous bravado, proudly taunting his opponent to “c’mon, c’mon.” But my father was older now, and perhaps at this stage in his fight, felt no shame throwing his hands up and pleading, “no más, no más” and calling it early, as Durán had against Leonard.

But unlike for Durán, there was no visible enemy standing before my father, either in the photograph or at the dinner table. Who, then, was in the ring battling my father? Who would throw such a sucker punch? Of course, I know the answer can only be time itself: almighty and undefeated, our precious friend and violent enemy. Time, who we—or most of us, at least—know we can’t outrun and so against all odds, we stay and fight for as long as possible. What part of us, I often wonder, chooses to partake in a battle that we know we will eventually and inevitably lose? It must be the same part of us that dares to dream—and fears that time won't lend enough of itself for us to see those dreams come true, unless we do indeed stay and fight. It’s the part of my dad captured in that photograph, shirtless, staring down the sun, taunting the world and demanding everything it’s got.

And there, holding the photograph, I felt a kinship to my father in the photo, outside of being his actual kin—rather, through space and time,  almost as if I was living in a photograph of my own, next to his. I like to think that photographs have the power to erase whatever history precedes its object and by this logic the object's future as well. When a shutter snaps it captures a person with no past or future, rendering them in the present tense for the rest of time. My father, 32 years old, was born at that moment, 30 some odd years ago in West Texas, when my mother snapped a photo of him on the front lawn, with no shirt on. And I too felt, in that moment, as if someone was snapping a photograph of me: no past, no future, just an elastic present that was only, always, just beginning.