ONE of my weekly jobs at the Addy is to put together the weddings page for Thursday’s paper. I love seeing the anniversary pictures – older couples alongside their wedding pictures from decades before. Memories frozen in black and white.
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Old photos are just so precious, aren’t they?
I got another reminder of this the other day. I was sitting in the hairdresser’s hot seat last week, joining in a rollicking conversation with everyone else in the salon (as often happens in Eaglehawk).
A couple, perhaps in their 50s, were the instigators of much conversation and laughter.
He commented that when he was young it was nothing for him to spend three hours getting his do done. He boasted he had a great head of hair back then.
Cue his wife, who delved into her purse to produce a well-worn black and white portrait of her man in his younger years.
How we passed that photo from woman to woman, to oohs and aahs and cries of “move over James Dean!”
Such a handsome young man peered back at us, and didn’t the subject in question just love it!
I thought it was the most beautiful thing, the fact that this lady had probably carried the picture with her, day in, day out, for probably 30 years or more. She’d carried the face of her young love daily.
And then it dawned on me, I do the same.
In my purse there’s little black and white picture of me and my husband, not long after we met.
It was taken in one of those photo booths at what was then Spencer Street Station, in the days before Instagram and selfies.
That picture is the memory of one sweet day.
He was at trade school in Melbourne, I was attending TAFE in Bendigo.
We stole a day away from classes to meet in the city and walk the streets together. With no money, no cares, we made our own fun that day.
Before the train came to take me back to Bendigo we popped into that photo booth and came away with a little strip of pictures, of pulled faces and still-chubby cheeks.
We each put a picture in our wallet and there they have stayed, for 16 years.
I whipped out my picture and my hairdresser sighed. She said, does your husband still look like that?
We have obviously both aged since then. But in my mind’s eye, in my heart of hearts, that is how we are forever. Huddled together, oblivious to what lies ahead, still stealing little moments to make our own fun among the bigness of what our lives together have become.
I looked at that man in the hairdressers and I looked at his photograph and the years between the two faces melted away. And the way his wife looked at him, he was still James Dean to her.
