Jeff McCulley

 

Photos I Never Took But Wish I Did

 

– My mother’s reaction the Christmas my father finally got her an engagement ring. I realize now she had long before despaired of ever receiving one, and I guess she knew when she married him what she was getting into. He packed the diamond ring in a Russian doll succession of ever-smaller boxes, the largest of which had originally held a pair of rubber rain boots, culminating in a plastic capsule from the vending machines outside the supermarket, stuffed with tissue and bearing a tag that said NOT WHAT YOU THINK! That Christmas I was seven and got my first real camera, a Kodak Instamatic, and forever I’ll regret not having taken at least one Mom Opening The Present picture, instead of blowing the whole roll on indistinguishable shots of my stocking. After making her way through all those boxes, I think she was just exhausted, emotionally and physically, but the expression I remember her giving my father as she extracted the shiny ring from the wad of tissue, sitting on the living room floor that was almost completely covered by all the decoy boxes and wrapping paper, was the closest thing to unadulterated love I ever witnessed pass between them.

– The first Japanese person I got a close look at, in the noodle stand at Narita. He was an older man, dressed in a suit with no tie, a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a homburg, and I swear he looked like a Japanese William S. Burroughs. He nodded as I took the stool next to his, the only one free, and before turning back to his bowl he regarded me with what seemed to be a lifetime of wisdom. As though to say, Well, here you are. The guy behind the counter stood with his hands on his hips and uttered something to me in Japanese. I pointed to a picture on the menu that looked tasty, and when they placed the bowl before me the savory steam rose up in my face, and I felt as if I was embarking on a thrilling adventure.

– Cherry blossoms. Not the famous ones at Ueno Park, in the spring sunlight. I took dozens of photos of those over the years, all slightly different – the people, the angles – and yet essentially identical. No, what I’m recalling are the cherry blossoms at night, in the little park at Shakuji where Tripper took me to my first cherry blossom viewing party. I’m frankly not confident you could capture that picture, the blossoms white as swans against the inky night sky. But it entranced me, their luminescence when I looked up at them, the breeze cool on my neck and a welcome buzz blooming inside me from a two-litre bottle of Asahi.

– Yumi at that party. Laughing, pretending to fight for the last skewer of yakitori.

– The teacart in The Tokyo Times newsroom, which I liked to imagine resembled the city in miniature. Clean round no-handle cups stacked upside-down in clusters recreating the hive-like housing complexes visible from the expressway. The hot water pot towering above them like the metropolitan government skyscraper. At the centre of it all, the ancient, pitted aluminum teapot, the cart’s Imperial Palace. Inevitably, there’d be a few unfinished cups of green tea (koi ponds, the dregs like bottom-dwelling fish), and off to the side, the landfill of the operation: the wire basket into which soggy spent tea was dumped like mounds of grass clippings. Sometimes – an audacious breach of etiquette – one of the desk editors would stub out a cigarette in it.

– Yumi with that pensive look she’d get translating a particularly inscrutable political column, hand under her chin and elbow propped on the block-like Kenkyusha dictionary.

– The beach at Kailua where I proposed to her. You’ve seen pictures, everybody has – the finest example of a beach in the world, on all the postcards. Palm trees, turquoise water breaking in waves over alabaster sand. But that’s not the beach where I proposed, not exactly.

– The landlord’s rooster at our first apartment. We often saw the rust-colored cock strutting and pecking in the dirt, or sunning itself motionlessly on the courtyard wall. Every day for the first two weeks its crowing woke us before sunrise. I threatened to throw a shoe at it from our balcony, or make a slingshot, but Yumi, good Buddhist and deferential tenant, forbade me. Then one morning, no crowing. That night, the landlord’s wife brought us a pot of chicken vegetable stew.

– Yumi holding Azumi right after she was born. Yumi’s face conveyed nothing. Perhaps pure exhaustion. Certainly not the cliché of love or elation. Azumi was a squirmy, greasy, closed-eye creature of indeterminate nature.

– Me watching Yumi hold Azumi. I would like to have seen the look on my face. Did it broadcast my revelation: My old life had just that minute ended, and a new one was ticking away?

– Our apartment when I returned that night. A document of transition. I shot all my film at the hospital, and to this day I don’t remember how the apartment looked, or how I got there from the hospital.

– The prayer plaque. Yumi tied it to a tree at the shrine near the station when we took the baby out for the first time. I carried her in one of those papoose holders, bundled against the autumn cold in many layers, and a knit cap the size of a teacup covering her tiny head. Yumi selected the plaque and wrote on it. I assumed it was for the health of the baby. But when I asked her what she’d written, she said, “A prayer for us.” Not Azumi? “For all of us,” she replied. Then she tied it to a branch already sagging with so many others that I could have filled the frame with wooden polygons, each covered with handwritten Chinese characters, surrounding ours, where my name in English stood out like the UNDELIVERABLE stamp on a dead letter.

 – Azumi before she learned to walk, bouncing in the Jolly Jumper my father sent from the States. I’m thinking of one particular day when I was home alone with her. The White Album was playing on the stereo. Azumi had been going at it in the jumper for over and hour and fallen asleep, her little sausage legs dangling just shy of the tatami floor. Suddenly she snapped awake and started bouncing again, delighting in it, grinning, springing higher on each hop, in time to the skip-rope rhythm of ‘Revolution 1.’ Every time John Lennon shooby-doo-woppingly averred that it was going to be all right, I had to sing along in a moment of perfect synchronicity.

– Yumi and Azumi asleep in the futon, any night that first winter. Nestled.

– Tripper’s two-hundred yen bike, purchased at the recycled goods shop run by the Vietnamese couple. A Schwinn Roadmaster probably dating to the Occupation. He painted it like a day-glo tiger, orange with crazy black stripes, furry-tail streamers off the ends of the handlebars.

– A tight overhead shot of the box lunches Yumi made when we rode with Tripper to picnic at Shakuji: golden tempura-topped sushi rolls, speckled brown and white boiled quail eggs, thick rounds of bamboo shoots, purple eggplant pickles, pink broiled salmon, bright green edamame, fat yellow slices of egg custard. For Azumi: red-skinned apple wedges cut into floppy-eared bunny faces, and rice balls shaped like cartoon hero Anpan Man, with sweet azuki bean eyes and pickled plum cheeks.

– Azumi at the day care, dressed in the requisite white apron and straw hat, and bowing to her teacher. Of course, I took many similar shots – Yumi presenting her to the teacher on opening day, for instance. But none accurately capture the look of solemnity with which our daughter always – even as a preschooler – greeted the sensei.

– The United States when we made our first visit back. I don’t think there’s a camera that could have done it justice, really. Certainly not my antiquated K-1000. I’d been living in Tokyo three years, and it seemed like two lifetimes. Like the years between the start of high school and college graduation. The big differences immediately struck you – fewer people, more space surrounding them, more heads with blond hair – but it was the little ones that seemed weirdest. Why couldn’t you buy beer in a vending machine here, anyway? The food I’d grown up on now seemed unappetizing and leaden, everything slabs of meat, accompanied by vegetables the size and texture of building materials. No lens could record the gargantuan, and, I felt, completely unwarranted, self-assurance of my fellow Americans, which had either sprung up in my absence or had escaped my notice until just then, and their strange dismissal of anything beyond their borders. The cumulative effect was the feeling I’d arrived in some alternate reality, a time traveller in a science fiction movie who returns to the present after having gone and irrevocably fucked up the past, and I couldn’t wait to get back to Tokyo.

– The wooden bridge over the creek to my father’s house, since replaced with an ugly concrete one.

– How I must have looked at Jos. A. Banks, getting the funeral suit fitted. Such a rush, I didn’t own a suit. None of Dad’s fit me – he was always taller and broader through the shoulders, even emaciated by years of liver disease. We needed the pants hemmed, right then, and they weren’t having it. I wanted to just do it at home with a stapler, but Yumi insisted. She insisted, and the salesclerk said, of course, it was no problem, they could rush it in an hour, we could go get a bite to eat and come back, it would be done and ready, but the tailor was clearly offended by the irregularity of it all. I remember standing on his stool, looking at myself in the three-way mirror, while the tailor, a bent, balding little man with a measuring tape draped around his neck and a face like disappointment personified, chalked the hem of the charcoal gray pants. Yumi telling me to stand straight, Azumi playing peek-a-boo with her reflections. The tailor asked if I wanted cuffs, I told him no, he asked again, saying it was customary to have cuffs with pleated slacks such as these, and I told him we didn’t have time for cuffs. He shook his head, said it wouldn’t look right without them. “Giuseppe, the gentleman is in a hurry, just mark the hem,” the clerk told him. Giuseppe reluctantly did as told. No cuffs. I can still see my face in the mirror as he worked. Getting fitted for a suit to wear to my father’s funeral. My two-year-old daughter crawling on the floor in front of me, my wife staring behind me. What was going through my brain? Could any photo of that scene tell me? Almost certainly not. But I still wish I had one.

– The tombstone. My father’s name carved in the granite next to my mother’s. Nothing especially dramatic about the way the shadows fell on it, just their names together. Nobody shoots a tombstone, though. It’s taboo.

– Yumi reading Olive magazine in church the Sunday before we came back to Japan. She didn’t want to go to church; I insisted. It was during the sermon, a lengthy one in which the priest implicated my father. To help me ‘work through’ my pain, ‘find closure’ or some such, the verses from Ecclesiastes about how to everything there is a season, etc. Between the time to rend and the time to love, my wife reached into her handbag and pulled out the magazine she always carried. Did I expect her not to read it? I guess I did.

– My father water-skiing. Yumi could never believe that he’d been a vigorous man; she only knew him after he got sick. But I remember him playing touch football with my cousins, and duck hunting every winter. And water-skiing. There’s a grainy Super-8 movie I shot when I was about ten, of him cutting through the wake on one ski as he passed in front of the shoreline where we played. He was a long way out, and I knew then he wouldn’t be much more than a smudgy thumbprint on the movie screen, and wished I had a good 35mm SLR with a telephoto instead.

– Azumi in the stroller in the center of the bicycle parking lot near Shakuji station through the years. The lot so overcrowded, so jumbled with bicycles that the aisles painted on the blacktop were scarcely clear enough for a person to walk a bike through. Bikes crammed into bikes, some of them fallen into piles and impossible to distinguish as individual bicycles. And surrounded by all this simple machinery, our little girl, sitting in her stroller like a bemused princess. I actually took this picture just before her first birthday. What I intended was to take the same picture every year, so you could watch her grow, gradually approach and overcome the scale of the bikes, which of course could never develop beyond what they were. But our little girl would.

– Tripper when I first met him. He didn’t live in my dorm, but he knew somebody there and was just leaving when I walked out to get dinner at the dining hall. The sun had nearly sunk below the hills and he shuddered slightly at the approaching chill, his curly sun-bleached hair brushing the shoulders of his denim jacket, and he carried a guitar slung across his back, like Woody Guthrie about to hop a freight train. I saw that guitar and had to strike up a conversation. At eighteen I was absolutely certain of the essential goodness of anybody with a guitar. His Australian accent, when he started talking, that sealed it.

– The cat in the window at the castle town we visited, a tortoise shell cat, adolescent (male, I’m certain even though I couldn’t tell from my vantage point; something, just the way he tilted his head, I guess, told me he was a tomcat), poking his head out the second-story window someone had opened after the rain. We’d fought about something, and Yumi had run off (to a coffee shop, no doubt, to pout), leaving us wandering the wet cobblestone streets back to the ryokan. I was watching my feet, trying not to slip as I walked hand-in-hand with Azumi. She pointed out the cat. By the time I got the lens cap off and the viewfinder to my eye, he was back inside.

– My hands. Clearly they were never strong or gentle enough. I might have seen that, trying to get them in focus, or scrutinizing a fine-grained print of them. But you can’t take a picture of your own hands. At least I never figured out how to.

– Azumi’s red canvas shoes at the bottom of the Shakuji playground slide. Weekends when Yumi wasn’t around and Azumi turned cranky, I’d take her to the park. Like all kids, she loved the slide and would climb to the top and position herself like a bobsledder cramming into the fuselage. Then she’d yank her shoes off and whip them down the slide emphatically, push off, and scoot after them. Laughing like she’d just pulled off a bank heist and her shoes were sacks of cash at the rendezvous.

– A series on the corner Chinese restaurant Tripper liked so much, and its wonderful home-delivery meals: 1) How when a certain pre-dusk light hit it in springtime, the facade took on an inviting orangish-pink tint; 2) The proprietor on his delivery motorcycle, the white helmet like a giant cue ball atop his head and the elaborate swinging rack on the back holding the dishes so they wouldn’t spill, even when rounding a corner; 3) The meal spread out on our low table in huge painted bowls and bamboo boxes, steam rising off the rice. (Azumi would be just outside the frame, beaming in delight.) 4) The empty dishes stacked on the landing in the morning, awaiting the delivery man’s retrieval.

– We had a ring-shaped pink plastic clothes-drying rack we won as a Lucky Box prize when Seibu Department Store’s baseball team took the Japan Series. We hung it on the balcony. When it was empty, the circle of plastic clothespins sprouting off the disc made it resemble a UFO in flight, especially when you viewed it lying down on the tatami, your head drooping backward onto the balcony, the pink ring contrasted against the impossibly blue sky. I thought the sky was blue. What the hell did I know?

– Yumi kissing Tripper. Even though I never saw it I can still picture it.

– The fatigue on Yumi’s face when she posed with Azumi outside Seibu while we were shopping for primary school clothes. I labored to compose a photo, making sure there was sufficient light to illuminate both mother and daughter in a natural, even tone. And yet, though not a single harsh shadow crossed her face, I managed to completely miss the weariness permeating Yumi to the core. Replaying the scene now in my mind’s eye, I see it clear as day. Any random stranger glancing our way on the street would have seen it. But I was too busy at the time taking the picture.

 

Photo I’ll Never Be Able To Take

 

– Azumi, her hair to her shoulders and wavy like Yumi’s but a shade lighter, with streaks of highlights, reddish brown or maybe some wild color, green or purple, dressed American-style in shorts and a tee-shirt, walking barefoot across the beach in Wherever, Australia. She’s got long legs, and perhaps more freckles around her nose than she’d like, and she’s smiling, her future as open as the horizon in front of her. There’s no weariness on her face, no hint of the deception and sorrow possible in this world; in fact, you can tell by looking at her she’s incapable of tricking or hurting anyone.