THOMAS LARSON

(Written and read on KPBS, summer 1992)

The photograph which was taken of me and my brother was push-pinned on my Dad's wall for many years. He looked at us in that photo regularly, writing at his desk on weekends while we played outside. The picture was taken at Disneyland by mother. In it my brother and I stand on either side of Donald Duck, one of those adult-sized Disney characters who works himself into thousands of tourists' pictures. We are dressed in our little Hawaiian shirts, blue pants, and blond heads. My Dad wrote about that picture in his journal. He tried to make a story out of the photograph. He tried to write about things that he imagined might have taken place just before or after it was taken, but he couldn't do it. Only the simplest things were clear for him then.

Was it the tone of my eyes which perplexed him? My expression had much to do with that tone. I had something suppressed on my face as if someone had just told me to smile and I didn't want to because being told to smile made me mad. Perhaps I was happy that day, not just because we were at Disneyland, but because I was nearly six and I knew I was in charge, a bit bigger and older than my brother, ready to escort him through the scarier rides. That's the way I look now. The emerging certainty in my face always photographs well. Perhaps I was sucking on candy and it puffed up my cheeks enough to push the hint of a cocky curve along the usual flat line of my mouth. I have often thought my Dad and I would have communicated more deeply had I looked directly into mother's camera that day. It would have meant I was looking straight at him. But I looked to one side, almost over his shoulder: I think that's what entranced him about me in the photograph. And the fact that it was taken a month after mother forced him to move out. It was the first thing of us she gave him.

But as I look closer I wonder if Dad was troubled more by my brother's calculated stare at the lens, his half-hidden right arm (both of mine are showing), his coquettish smile from beside the Duck's mouth, a mouth like the bell of a trombone. Neither I nor the Duck confronted the camera with such guile. Maybe my brother was smirking at the Duck (at me? at himself?), intending that we laugh at him later, knowing the Duck could see nothing clearly out of that costume. The Duck is an adult absurdity of a child's passion. He stands between us short in size but his head is a head or two above ours. He wears a blue serge suit with big white buttons and a red bow tie. His dark blue sailor's cap tops off his enormous fluffy head. His feet are orange, his beak yellow, his fur white. And the Duck's eyes are as big as our faces were then.

Can you see our three poses in the photograph, Dad? Can you see that we are all a bit off-center, our faces stuffed for the camera, faces later to be interpreted or denied or faced? Can you see it now as you stare at us from your desk and imagine in your journal that I am writing this confession to you when I've reached your age? If you are still following me (and I am still following you, the master and the master's puppet), then you may know that I have wanted to tell you for years that you were to see us safe only in the instant the Duck gathered us to him with his three-fingered hands on our shoulders, and mother snapped that picture and gave it to you. You know who we wished was between us when we were there that day.