Mr. Akers - East Side Middle School

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Paris, rue du Chevalier de la Barre, 1940's

In the picture, my father stands on the steps of a church in France. He is a young man, in his early 20s most likely, and he stands with another young man, posing for an unknown photographer. The day looks sunny and warm, and my father squints slightly as he looks into lens.
In the picture, my father wears the uniform of a U.S. Army sergeant. While I do not know the date of this photograph, I do know that my father was born in 1920 in Polo, Missouri. Later in his early teens, his family moved to Indiana, and several years after that, when World War II began, he enlisted in the Army. He was given a uniform and a rifle and was sent to fight. When the fighting stopped, he would go to Europe and would stand in front of a French church with another soldier named Bill Glover and have his picture taken. Then, he would return to Indiana, marry, have three children, divorce and marry again, this time to the woman who would become my mother. He would have one more child when I was born in 1967, and 14 months after my birth, my father would have a heart attack and die suddenly. He was 47.
In the picture, my father is trim and tan and strong. I have no personal memories of my father, but I'm told he loved me very much. A few years ago, I located a shoebox in the attic that contained about twenty 16mm films. They were home movies of my family, taken when my father was still alive. In these films, even though he was in his late 40s, my father still looks trim and tan and strong. The movies show my parents and brothers and sisters in a variety of settings: on vacation at Coney Island, at a family gathering in Missouri, opening Christmas presents in our living room, playing kickball in our yard. I enjoy seeing my brothers and sisters as children. I am the youngest in our family, so in all of the memories of my own childhood, my siblings are old, almost adults. I like watching them chase each other and mug for the camera with a child's utter lack of self-consciousness. They smile, and I smile back. But it's the image of my father that holds me transfixed. I watch him wave to the camera, and he laughs as my brothers wrestle with him on the grass. He stands behind my sister with his arms around her and shows her how to swing a golf club. My sister, Susie, looks to be about 8 or 9 years old, and every now and again in the movies, she turns to look over her shoulder at him, and she grins when she does this. These were not my father's biological children. My mother had also been married before she met my father and was widowed after giving birth three times. She was introduced to my father, who also had three children of his own, and they were married a year later, merging the two families into one. My father adopted the children from my mother's first marriage and gave them his name, a name that they still have kept to this day. Susie was born a "Lane," became an "Akers" and when she speaks about "Daddy," we know she is talking about my father, the man who adopted her, not her biological father who died when she was two. When I watch the image of my father embracing her, when I watch the way she laughs as he hugs her, when I watch my brothers climbing up his arms to perform chin-ups for the camera, I see a man and his children. Not someone else's kids...his.
In the picture, my father's uniform bears a ribbon over his breast pocket. Several patches are sewn onto his sleeve, and the lines of his jacket and trousers are straight, paralleling the pillars of the church he stands before. Later, I would learn that this was the Basilique du Sacré Coeur in Paris. In the background of the photo stand two tourists in short skirts and white socks. One of the women looks down into the lens of a camera. This tells me that the photograph was taken sometime after 1945, after the war had ended and Paris liberated. My father did not fight in Europe. His unit was sent to North Africa to chase Rommel through the deserts of Morocco and Algeria and to be chased in kind. Later, they would be stationed in Europe, and I like to think that this photograph was taken during happier times for my father. In the scenario I've invented, my father and Bill Glover are on a weekend leave, and have taken a bus to go sightseeing. In my scenario, my father and Bill Glover visit Sacre Coeur and ask a pretty young French woman to take their picture. In my scenario, my father and Bill Glover smile at the pretty young French woman and strike the pose of two brave young soldiers on the steps of a French church. In my scenario, the pretty young French woman snaps the photo, and then kisses my father and Bill Glover on both cheeks and thanks them for all they have done for her country. I don't believe this is what really happened, but I have no way of learning the actual events of this day, so I invent a story that makes me happy.
In the picture, my father wears his Army cap tilted at a rakish angle. Sometimes, when I look at the picture, I see a soldier who was given a uniform and a rifle and was sent to fight. Other times, though, when I look at the picture, I see the young man I imagine my father was. I look at the picture and wonder what his childhood was like. What dreams did he have? What memories followed him to Africa and Europe? I would ask him these questions, but I can't. The photo was given to me by my sister at my daughter's 5th birthday party. Jana, my father's oldest daughter, a product of his first marriage, pulls me aside and hands me an envelope. "Joey," she says, calling me by my little boy name as she has done for as long as I can remember, "I found these." The envelope contains several photographs, pictures of long-dead relatives from my father's side whom I have never met. There are also several pictures of my father as a young man. In one of the photographs, he wears a dark suit and tie and stands in front of a clapboard house. In another, on an unknown beach, he wears a bathing suit and has a towel thrown around his shoulders. In another picture, he holds a young baby, his first son. Photos of my father are somewhat rare. More of them exist in his later years, when the technology of photography was more common, but there are few pictures of his youth. His family was poor, and a camera was most likely a luxury they couldn't afford. "I found these pictures of Daddy when he was young," Jana says, "and you should have them." Jana knows that my only connection to my father is through images on film. She knows that I'm now a father myself with no role models to follow. "You should have them," she says and she hands me the envelope. I open it and thumb through the pictures and see my father standing on the steps of a French church.
In the picture, my father does not smile. His expression is serious, and the line of his mouth is straight. I can't tell if this is artifice or if my father felt grim that day. It is the only photo of him I've seen where he is not smiling or laughing. Perhaps this was a mask he wore to impress the pretty young French woman who I imagine took his picture. I choose to think this, since the stories I hear about my father suggest he was a gentle, friendly, open man who laughed a lot and hugged his children a lot. My brother, Jeff, tells me that my father would often flop down on the floor in front of the television to watch professional wrestling with Jeff and my brother Marc. My father would pretend to root for the bad guy, knowing that it riled my brothers up, and my brothers would cheer loudly when the villain inevitably lost. My father would laugh with them, and this makes me miss him. I like the fact that my father acted like this, and I wish I could have watched television with him too. I know that I've romanticized my father, diminishing his faults and accentuating his virtues. I'm like a person who sorts through a drawer of coins, throwing away the dull pennies and keeping only the shiny new ones. But I like the image of my father watching TV with his family, of him teaching my sister to swing a golf club, of him laughing. He was a man who took in stray dogs and stray children, and that is how I want to remember him. He died when I was a year-and-a-half old. I've earned that right.
In the picture, my father wears a ring on the third finger of his left hand. He is standing at the entrance of a great stone cathedral. His left leg is straight, and he has placed his right foot on the next highest step and turned slightly, so that he is in half-profile. His left hand hangs to his side, and his right hand rests on his propped up thigh. It looks like the pose that a young man in uniform would strike if he were trying to appear brave and handsome to impress a pretty young French woman. His hands are also tan, and his fingers are muscled and strong. They are the hands of a boy who grew up on a farm, a boy who has known hard, physical work, even after his family left the countryside and moved to the city. They are hands that would later build houses, that would hammer and drill and saw. When I turn the photograph over, I see my father's handwriting. I don't know when he wrote the caption, but I notice that letters are smooth and neat, almost feminine by today's standards. The penmanship seems out of character for the carpenter's hands on the other side. The letters loop and swirl, and the lines are wide. They look as if they flowed from a fountain pen pressed firmly to the photo-paper. The text reads:
Bill Glover & myself in front of Sacre Coeur.
It is the first time I have ever seen my father's handwriting. I have no artifacts that carry his signature except this photograph, and the letters on the back of the picture bring him to life in a way that 16mm film cannot. We have since transferred the film stock of our home movies to videotape, and now, I can slide the tape into my VCR and conjure up my father's image. I watch the pixels coalesce, and he moves and smiles and laughs. On screen, he seems more real than he is in a photograph or when he's waiting in my memories for me to bring him back to life. But my father never seems more alive, more real, than when I look at his handwriting. I open the envelope, and when I withdraw the photograph, the ghost of my father floats out with it. It swirls around my head, and I breathe the ghost in. It envelops me, and I wear it almost like a veil until finally the ghost settles onto the Velox paper in the form of hand-written letters, looped and swirled in black ink. I read the words, and my throat tightens and my eyes sting and my breath becomes short. I place my hands on the paper, trace the letters with my finger, and I am reaching back through time, across the universe, to take my father's hand in mine.