The Early Posthumous Work

Pop? In a Hat? C’mon.

15 Pop? In a Hat? C’mon. In early August 1947, my father turned forty years old; I was zero. Actually I was about a month old, and being a slow child it had not yet occurred to me what being forty years younger than my father might mean. When I got to be ten, he would be fifty. There were four other children, three older brothers and an older sister, and so, at one month, I was probably busy listening to their advice, on the one hand, and defending myself on the other. It was much later that I understood that my older siblings had had childhoods different from mine. It first dawned on me on a visit home after college, when I had dragged out the home screen and the old Bell & Howell movie projector—cast iron, steel, and glass and heavy as an artillery shell—and cued up some of the family films from the handsome, heavy wood box which had been stored in a closet. My father was an early and accomplished amateur photographer , and the home movies he took date back to the thirties. To me it was perhaps more impressive that the movies ended in the early fifties, when I was about five, and he about forty-five. Sometime in those years he lost interest, or energy, or both; now, not far from forty-five myself, that doesn’t seem surprising. 16 The Early Posthumous Work But it was not only the fact of these movies that struck me, years ago, when I watched them for the first time as an adult. It was their content. There, on reel after reel of eight millimeter black and white, were my brothers and my sister, teasing dogs, reading books, playing baseball and football, opening Christmas presents, and splashing in the surf at the beach. They apparently went to the beach a lot. A number of these home movies had titles, elaborately arranged “plots,” single-framing, and other tricky business. A surprising effort, in terms of the energy and attention, had clearly gone into their making. Especially the earlier ones. As the dates grew more recent, the films grew fewer, the filmmaking more perfunctory. Late in this archive was some footage of the neighborhood on the far west side of Houston where I grew up. Now I finally understood what my parents meant when they said that, when they had moved out there six years before I was born, the place was a prairie. Great trees I knew only as adults appeared in the movies as scrawny little saplings. If they appeared at all. The films, many having acquired a sepia tint, recorded my grandparents as middle-aged and overdressed, getting in and out of cars which to me were the stuff of legend—the Lincoln Zephyr , and several Studebakers, only the last of which, a green one, I could remember. They recorded my mother, young, almost girlish , trying to wave the camera aside—a classic shot in family films—and then giving in and laughing. And they recorded a young man, standing beside one of the cars, or swimming, or swinging one of his children around, or wearing a hat (a hat!), or sometimes racing to get into the picture, and smiling more than I ever saw him do. Who’s that? I thought, but I knew who it was. I had just never seen him before. I’ve known my father only as a middle-aged and an old man. He doesn’t swim. He wears no hats. There hasn’t been a lot of going to the beach, or fishing, or playing catch in the backyard. We played chess. Although he took a lot of still photographs, he Steven Barthelme 17 had quit making movies. What I recall him making most was work. My father is the world’s champion inventor of chores; once, we made a rug. Likely the reason I remember with fondness all the home repair and remodeling projects, the fetching of tools and even the homemade philosophy which always accompanied these jobs, is that this constituted my acquaintance. This and the dreaded “serious talk.” He was always a great talker. There was a lot of talk, and a lot of it was about age, and all of that reflected the folly of being young. I remember when my father told me my thirty-five-year-old brother was...