The Rotary Factor

“As time passes, the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.” -Stephanie Coontz

There’s a toddler shot of me, a photograph with those classic rounded corners and Kodak color tonality, in which I’m holding the receiver of our yellow rotary phone to my head, its confused curly cord hanging in a heap of monster to my side. 

Isn’t it something how the very act of memorializing that moment now gives me the gift of a smile. Or you might even say, the gift of denial...

There was a lot of pain in my family at that time, and shaping me, as it has the habit of doing. But my Mom always had her camera nearby. And now that moment of the minuscule me holds only cuteness factor; it’s ready for contribution to that mix of glass-half-full family photos worldwide. 

Those images we all accumulate to make better on our stories, later on. 

Isn’t it a wonder of our human programming that our systems try to resolve their traumas by instinctively finding the beauty in the lower vibration scenes of our past? That we can erase and refabricate the backstories of the protagonists we all represented as we walked within those scenes in real time?

Selective Celebration… how clever, something about us, truly must be.

And how smart we are, to frame up our reframes of memory. 

And place them on the walls of our homes.

Featured: “Backyard Mitt” - a shot from one of the many tiny corners of a work I was commissioned to make for, and about, the former President of a major NYC museum, for her birthday.