Point of View

Memories.JPEG

Will Plante (2021)

I lay out on the old, army green couch in our living room. We’d had this couch about twenty years now, and the collective dog hair of 15 years worth of pets plumed up in a faint cloud, before settling to every surface it could stick itself to, including me. I opened my laptop and set my camera down on the couch next to me.

As I opened the screen of my laptop, the dark living room was bathed in a faint digital glow mixed with the moonlight coming in through the window behind me. I scratched at the scruff on my chin and adjusted my glasses on my nose so the login screen came into focus. I keyed in my password, and after the old laptop struggled for a minute or two to load, the desktop popped up.

I did this every night after meets. It used to be just the boys team, a side hobby for my son’s benefit. But slowly I had accumulated more and more attention with my photos to the point where I was taking photos year round for New Hampshire Cross Country. I plugged my camera into the laptop, and began the transfer process. Approximately 3,000 photos were now freshly loaded onto the laptop, and ready to go through the editing process.

As I scrolled through the photos, making a crop or a focus where necessary, I stopped for a slightly longer pause than normal when a photo of my son and his teammates popped up. God, how far they had come from the scrawny 6th graders, trying the sport for the first time.

I landed on a picture of my son, Will, leading a chase pack out of the woods and back across the Nashua South football field. The meet had taken place not even 10 hours ago, and yet I couldn’t help but think about all the times he’d made that same mad sprint across that field. Normally, I’m not the reminiscent type. My wife takes care of that. But something about these photos made me think back to when I was really only photographing Will.

I closed out of the editing window and opened my file explorer. I found the file titled “2017/18 XC”, opened it, and selected the sub-file “Nashua Invite”. I scrolled through the old photos. Instead of a massive file full of boys and girls photos from all different teams to be sent to NHXC, the file only held pictures of the Londonderry boys and girls. I found a photo of Will, and scratched my chin again as I looked at it. He was smaller, and skinnier, with shoulders too wide for his bony torso. He was such a funny sight to watch at those meets, but still somehow so fast.

I closed out of the file, and keyed in a new file name: “16-LMS-XC-Tri”. A file opened with only about 120 photos in it. The photos were still of the same setting, the Nashua course finish line, but this time the boys in the photos were middle schoolers. I found Will again, running up over the hill in the flashy middle school uniforms the Top 7 boys got to wear. He was even smaller now, and he wore grey and orange running goggles that obnoxiously obscured his face. He had worn those things all through middle school until he got contact lenses the summer before high school. His mouth was open in a heavy exhale, and his red, white, and blue braces were showing.

I remembered now how the race had ended. Will’s team had won by a landslide, as the middle school team usually had, but he was unhappy with his performance. He cried about being passed in the shoot, and not staying the number 2 guy on the team. I had had to talk him down, out of his tantrum, and tell him no one was gonna think less of him, and I wasn’t quite sure if he listened. The following week, he went on to get third overall in the state race and give his team the boost they needed to win the state race. I remember him after that meet, hugging me and saying “Dad, could you believe that? I hadn’t beat most of those kids all year!” he had said, with the 3rd place plaque in his hands and the team victory medal around his neck.

“Yeah buddy,” I had replied. “That was crazy! You’d never told me you could run like that. And hey, no one caught ya on the finish either.”

“Nope,” he had said. “I had a good 100 meters on the next guy!”

“You sure did. Hey I think the New Hampshire cross country guys want a team interview; go find Tyler and Cole and the others.”

I covered my mouth with my hand as the memories of those meets came back. The middle school team rarely lost a race. And not once came in worse than second. Will had had so much more fun back then. Competing with his teammates and beating every team in the state.

I closed out of this file, and went back even further. I found an old file titled “ATHikes” and opened it. A few subfiles popped up, and I picked the one titled “BPw/Pepere”. The photos predated Will’s interest in running by about two years. Instead, they were of an overnight trip he and I had taken along with my own father, Will’s Pepere, up Bald Pate Mountain.

I remembered that trip vividly. My father had barely gotten up the mountain, and Will just wanted to keep going. He had always been too energetic. After we set up our tent at the campsite, it only took him five minutes to spill an entire can of Spaghetti-O’s in the tent. The little ass then proceeded to wake up at two in the morning, declaring he was ready to start hiking back down the mountain. God I almost strangled him that night, but it was still one of the best trips we’ve ever taken.

The pictures were mostly of the views, or of Will and my dad carving branches into little, pointed spears at the campsite. There was also one of the three of us a through hiker had taken at the mountain peak. That one still hung in my father’s mudroom.

I closed the old files and put the laptop down. I went as quietly as I could up the stairs, as I was the only one in the house still awake. I entered my home office, and rummaged through the junk drawer until I found an old, purple, plastic hard drive. I went back downstairs and plugged it into my laptop, a small cloud of dust coming off the old flash drive as I pushed it into the USB port.

I scrolled down in the file explorer until I found the USB file and selected it. The photos on it hadn’t been looked at in about 13 years. Will was 4 years old at most. I scrolled through the photos, looking at each one. Will at a Portland Sea Dogs game.Will at a train show; he had loved trains so much as a kid. Will on Santa’s lap at the Santa’s Village the elementary school used to put on.

I found some videos, too. They were all from our old house in Maine. The first video was probably the oldest video of Will running that existed. It was pouring rain outside, and both mine and my wife’s cars were parked out in the driveway. Will was running in and out of the garage, going around our cars as he did. He was laughing as he went. Maddie, only 2, trailed behind them. My wife and I were in the garage filming. Everyone was laughing, Will most of all.

The next video was even older. Will was barely three, and he sat on the couch next to his infant sister. He told her some garbled story about Thomas the Tank Engine only he could follow. His sister Maddie sat in the baby seat next to him, a trapped audience to his made up story. The pacifier fell out of her mouth and she began to cry. Will grabbed it quickly, and popped it back into her mouth, albeit upside down and lopsided, but she stopped crying.

It was then I noticed I’d been looking at old photos for an hour. I unplugged the USB, and set it on the IKEA end table next to the couch. I plugged my camera back in, and returned to the photos of the cross country meet. Yet again, going slower on the photos of Will and his friends.

I finished the photos at around 12:30, and went to upload the Londonderry photos onto the Lancer cross country website. I opened a Google tab and went up to my bookmarks to find the photo page. It was then I realized the other things I had bookmarked. Recruitme.org, Coledgesearch.org, the list of college resources went on. My eyes began to well up a little bit, which was strange. I hadn’t gotten teary-eyed in quite a while. I blinked them away and re-focused.

I finished the upload and sent the rest of the photos of other teams off to the guys at NHXC to do with as they wished. I closed my laptop, pulled myself up off the couch, and went upstairs. I crawled into bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

The next morning, I was sipping my coffee and scrolling through the news on my laptop when Will came downstairs, his hair still wet from the shower.

“Hey buddy, how’d you sleep?” I asked

“Fine,” he said, and then looked at me. “Hey did you go rummaging through your office for something last night? Swear I heard someone in there round 11ish.”

“Yeah I was just…” I paused, looking at the USB still sitting on the end table. I laughed and finished, “Just looking for some work stuff.”

“Right,” he said. And went into the kitchen to make a bowl of cereal. He went about his normal morning routine, yet I couldn’t help but see it anew. How many more times was I going to get to see him in the mornings? Getting ready for school, still half asleep. Not enough, probably.

Once Maddie was finally finished getting ready, Will picked his bag up, and slung it over his shoulder. “Heading out!” he announced.

“Alright, have a great day!” I said, looking up from the laptop. He turned to head out the door, and I called him back.

“D’I forget something?” he asked, looking puzzled.

“No,” I said. I just wanted to get a good look at his face, and commit it to memory. So I didn’t have to put it in a computer file. Just this once. “Love you, Buddy. Go get ‘em,” I said.

He smiled back at me. “You too, Dad,” he said, and he was out the door.

I watched him out the window. It was pouring out. A thick, cold rain made large, lethargic splashes as it landed, not unlike that day in Maine so long ago. I waved to him out the window, and he waved back. My son got in the car and drove away. The house was quiet, now. I let the lack of noise sink in, realizing this would soon be every day. I looked at the USB on the end table. I picked it up and walked into the kitchen. On the blank side, with a sharpie, I wrote:

Memories.JPEG

I looked at the USB for a long time, making sure I wouldn’t forget it again. As I went up to my office to start my morning meeting, I slipped the USB into my front shirt pocket. I decided, for today at least, I would keep the memories close.

Grape Tomatoes

Max Jean (2020)

I collect all the necessary components for this meal, along with my scattered thoughts. I need time to reflect before I fill out his Parent Brag Sheet. I think back to holding him for the first time, jaundiced and crying for warmth and then the depression that followed me after. His first words, his first steps. He was my second, but there were so many firsts with him.

I pour a box of pasta into the boiling water as I peruse my mental scrapbook. He was an anxious child, upset by raised voices in his direction. He was six when we sent him to Matthew Thornton for day camp. Every day, like clockwork, he claimed ill, begging me to bring him back home. I obliged, knowing instinctively what he didn’t have the words to articulate. I think of Lucas, his first friend. He didn’t care much for new experiences; he found someone he liked and stuck to them. I can imagine his thoughts, “I have friends, why make more?” Then comes second grade and along with it, Sarah. I had been friends with her mother at the time. So they met, and they stuck. I’m not sure if it was a matter of not caring to, or being unable to, but he talked to few other children. More would come, eventually, but for a long time it was him and Sarah against the world. I think of him now, so different but still very much the same.

Gavin came three years after him, the complete opposite of his quiet, introspective personality. Alone, they often got along well enough. With their older brother added to the mix, they were at each other’s throats. The two of them rotated as if on a schedule, one day Gavin and Jake worked together to pull every item out of Max’s closet, the next, he and Jake schemed to hide Gavin’s favorite stuffed animal. They have all mellowed quite a bit, but I still remain mediator to the occasional outburst.

The early teenage years were hard for him. “Seventh grade,” he told me much later, “was the worst year of my life.” It was a combination of things, I’m sure. He had clung so long to Sarah, that once they were finally separated, he didn’t know what to do. He was a Hurricane, but Sarah, and the few other friends he had made along the way, were not. Along with the general pain of outgrowing his childhood, this isolation was the worst thing for him at such a vulnerable time. I knew one of my children would inherit the mental turmoil that followed Michael’s and my own family histories. At this time, I realized, he would be the one to bear the burden. Neither of our parents had been much for communication, and we struggled to articulate our support for him. It wasn’t until two years later that he truly came out of it.

I’ve noticed his humor more often recently, and I’ve realized he is so much more him than before. His compassion, his intonation. These parts of him have always been there, and now seem to have so much more life to them. I think of him as an infant and him now; I never could have imagined the path that life would pull him along, but I couldn’t be prouder.

I toss the halved tomatoes into a mixture of balsamic and olive oil, and I rinse my hands. I’ll write while the pasta cooks.

My Not-So-Little Girl

Celia Ponto (2019)

I stretch long black tape over the freshly swept garage floor, outlining my newly licensed daughter’s parking spot. I told Celia I would let her park in the garage, and that my car would be the one parked in the driveway. As I stand up to admire my work, a smaller taped parking spot catches my eye. Celia and I made this many years ago when she was about seven years old. She would always park her bicycle right in front of the door to the upstairs, and my wife and I would always bump into it and knock it over. No matter how many times we told her not to park there, she always did. So my wife and I decided to designate a spot for her to park her bicycle. The tape I put down today will also prevent her from parking too close to the door.

When I compare the size of the bicycle space to the car space, I can’t help but see the years of growth between then and now. So much has happened, so much time has passed. How could I have let precious time slip through my hands? I have watched this beautiful little girl grow from learning to walk, to driving a car, and everything in between. It all happened so fast.

A painful thought crosses my mind; I think of how she will only be using this space for two years before she is off to college, and this only serves to send me further down my reminiscent spiral. I have two more years of my eldest daughter being a kid. I feel like I blinked, and she went from starting kindergarten to looking at colleges.

In the years since this little parking spot was made, many things have changed. Our family has had its ups and downs. One of the ‘downs’ was in December of 2016, when I was informed that by the end of the following year I would no longer have a job, as the company I worked for was on the verge of bankruptcy. My wife and I went into savings mode and did everything we could to save money. It was Celia’s idea to use a fake tree that year, even though she loved having a real tree in the house. She saw that we were struggling to keep costs low and give all three of our children a Christmas to remember, so she suggested we use the fake tree in the basement rather than spend 100 dollars or more on a real tree. She convinced her brother and sister to support this decision as well. She will never know how much it meant to her mother and I that she was willing to be flexible and give up a tradition that I know she so looked forward all year long. That was when I really started to notice how grown up and conscientious she had become.

While many things have changed, some, I am glad to say, have remained the same. One of those being the fact that Celia has always been sure of herself. She has never changed herself just to fit in somewhere. She has always been confident in the fact that she knows exactly who she is. I really do admire her for this. I don’t know if I could say the same about myself during my teenage years. She also has surrounded herself with a group of friends that help her, support her, and push her to be a better person. I am so proud of her for this.

In addition to those qualities, Celia has always known the value of hard work and perseverance. I have seen this not only in her school work, but in her job as well. She knows that anything worth having is worth working for, and her attitude shows it.

I feel like there is always a new moment where I see that I have overlooked so much of her growth, but I don’t want to feel like I keep missing things. During these next two years I will observe the changes as they happen, and not after they have already taken place. I plan to savor each day spent with my not-so-little girl, and to hold on to each precious moment a little longer than the last. As much as it pains me to see my little girl growing up, I pray everyday for her to continue to develop into the beautiful woman she is turning out to be.

Mother and Daughter, Yin and Yang

A. G. (2018)

Monday mornings are always the hardest part of every week. Seeing three kids out the door used to be a nightmare, but they don’t need me to make their lunch or help them get dressed anymore. Regardless, I am always up by seven to see them before they head to school. Now that my youngest has gotten on the bus, I can finally get to work. As I sit down to my desk, my email refreshes from the night before. Fifteen unread emails appear on the screen in front of me. Stress from all of these deadlines starts to fill my body, as I ask myself “Why do I fill my plate with so many assignments?” Then I remember my oldest, Megan, is going off to college next year. Maybe if my husband and I knew how to budget money better I wouldn’t be in this position now. Never less, that is not the case.

As I start to tackle my inbox, my phone chimes. I swear to God if my son has forgotten something for school again I am going to lose it. Surprisingly, it is my daughter instead.

Chris said he’d grab a milkshake after school with me that cool?

Okay.

I can’t help but be giddy with excitement. Finally, a boy is paying attention to Megan. Maybe this is what she needs to end her “bisexuality” phase. I still can’t get over how she hid so much of her first relationship from me, her mother of all people. She never brought up that Amy girl unless I mentioned her first, but still claimed they dated for over a year. How could seeing some girl at school count as dating? And why was she so afraid to open up to me about it? Her coming out was the biggest shock of my life, because she had the audacity to keep me out of the loop. I know all of her other gay friends, girls changing into boys and boys changing into girls is only confusing her. These teenagers are way too young to be going around declaring they don’t align with a gender or will only date people of the same sex. Megan needs to find a good boy that treats her right. No daughter of mine is gay. I raised her, I have always been at home with her, I would have been able to tell. The poor thing is confused, and her stubbornness won’t let her see I am right.

My phone chimes again, interrupting my thoughts. It is Megan. She never texts me this often, so she must want something.

Got some more hoco pics from last night, figured you’d want to see :)

I open up the pictures she sent me. At first, I see all the same girls she has been friends with since elementary school. Why my daughter never branches out is beyond me. When I was her age, I was hanging out with friends, going to parties almost every single night. Between dance, work, dance, and National Honor Society, Megan never has time to be social. She puts too much pressure on herself to do well in school and her extracurriculars. Whenever I tell her she needs to loosen up and be a teenager, she rolls her eyes at me. Doesn’t she understand I am only looking out for her?

As I swipe through more pictures, I start seeing her with girls I have never seen before. This has me panic. What if Megan has a thing with one of these girls, and sending me these pictures is her way of telling me? Was this a Amy situation all over again? I start zooming in on the pictures, looking for any extra little detail. One girl has her hand on my daughters’ waist, while the next has her arm behind Megan’s back. Were any of these poses silent signs of affection? This is why she needs to tell me if she has figured out who she likes, so I don't have to question every time someone new comes along. Amy was like a slap in the face, and I must make sure that never happens again.

My phone ping startles me for the second time. I see a message from my husband light up the screen.

I’m at work have a gr8 day sweetie!

I respond immediately. Megs is going out for milkshakes with Chris after school.

K c u after golf.

Ugh, he doesn’t get it. This is a big turning point in my daughter's life: a date with a boy! I start to feel excited for her all over again. I hope it goes well, for both of our sake.

My day is boring, full of conference calls, drawing, and responding to emails as usual. Before I know it, I hear the garage door open. She is home from her date! I hear the kitchen door open and her say, “Hey Mom!” The thud of a backpack follows next, followed by the refrigerator door opening.

“Hey honey, how was school?”

“Good, I got an A on my Calc test!”

“That’s nice, how was your date?”

“My what?” She pokes her head into my office.

“Your date with Chris?”

“Oh my God mom it was not a date! Look, I was really craving a milkshake and...” Megan starts rambling on about how none of her other friends were around and he said he would go with her. It all sounds like a lame cover up to me. A sentence did catch my attention though. “Molly even joined us.”

“Molly? Who’s Molly? I’ve never heard of her before.”

“Yes you have mom. She’s in band. We hung out at homecoming together. I even sent you a picture.”

“You have a thing with this Molly girl?”

“What? Mom no! She has a girlfriend.” I shake my head. I will never understand how teenagers think all of this is okay. When I was in high school, we rebelled by stealing pumpkins and playing jokes, not by changing our genders and coming up with a new identity every other minute. Before I know it, Megan is out the door again, on her way to dance.

“Okay bye Mom text you when I get there.”

“Alright drive safely, sweetie!”

“Yep!”

I look out the window and watch her hop into the car. In seconds, she is down the street, out of sight. Walking back to my office, I can’t help but let out a sigh. All I want is for her to open up to me, yet she never does. She won’t tell me anything about her day; those details are only for her friends to know. She always seems happy and she stays out of trouble, which I am thankful for. But, she’s not the daughter I pictured I would have. My perfect daughter and I would do our nails, gab about boys and relationships, and be each other’s best friends, like how I am with my own mom.

I can’t help but reflect on when she was little. We used to be attached at the hip. After preschool we would often go out for lunch or have a spa day at home. It was such a pain to paint those tiny fingernails but she loved changing up the colors once a week. She is still like that today, but says now she has to learn how to do her own. I remember the days I used to dress her and play with her hair, as if she was my personal Barbie doll. Now the idea of makeup appalls her, and my opinions on her outfits are disregarded with an eye roll. Those days are definitely over.

I guess life knows how to throw some curve balls. Next year she’s going to be off at college, and who knows where life will take her from there. I wish she was four again, when everything was so much simpler. I sit back down at my desk, and respond to another email. My phone pings.

I’m at dance, love you :)

I smile at my phone. I may not understand her, but she’ll always be my daughter.

Works Cited

"Tillie Olsen in her 60s." Wikimedia Commons, 1984, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tillie_Olsen_family_photo.jpg