Apr 12, 2016 3 min read

Each time I see someone taking a selfie, which is to say, every three minutes, I’m reminded that my family took few photos. Or at least they took very few of me after I was about 10, by which time I developed into a rather pudgy, crewcut, bespectacled adolescent with pants worn too high and button-down shirts closed at the collar. Hmmm. Maybe that’s why they stopped: I was ugly.

I grew up in the age before cellphone cameras, before digital cameras, before “instant” Polaroids – even before 60-second Polaroids. This was the age of Kodak box cameras and flashbulbs and rolls of film gingerly wound onto take-up spindles by stubby, unskilled fingers more suited for poking the tops of Brach’s chocolates to see what filling they held than for loading film. After we took our snapshots – and I know this will come as a shock to anyone younger than 30 – we had to wait to see what they looked like. We dropped off the exposed film rolls at the drugstore to be developed and printed.

Our black-and-white snapshots came back to us pinned by silver clasps into yellow, embossed cardstock mini-albums, about 10 pictures to a set, with a bright red “Kodak” emblazoned on the cover. The results were nothing special – just proof we visited such and such vacation spot in such and such year and fought over such and such things all the way there and back again. The photographer never appeared in the picture unless the camera had a self-timer. No one made duck lips.

There are plenty of shots of me from the time I was born until I became a candidate to model ‘husky” clothes for the Spiegel’s catalog in the late ’50s. Here’s a picture of me in a highchair in a kitchen I vaguely remember. It’s in our rented house on 15th Street, a shack so poorly heated my parents closed off the living room in winter by hanging a thin woolen blanket over its doorway.

Here’s one of me at about age 2, posed with my parents in our backyard, my father holding my head straight so I won’t turn it and ruin the picture. Dad attempted to hold my head straight, at least virtually, until I was 18. Then he gave up. In this shot, Dad stares into the camera, expressionless, squinting slightly. His hair is parted in the middle, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to the elbows, his pleated pants sagging. Mom’s in a flowered button-front dress. Her hair is parted on the left in the style of every mother from every TV show who couldn’t afford to have her hair done like J une Cleaver and Donna Stone.

The last of this photographic crazy quilt shows me sitting on a horse-drawn fire wagon in Gettysburg, where my mom, sister and I went on vacation in 1959. After that, the pictures stopped.

I’m sure I was alive in 1965, 1966 and 1967 because I have high school yearbooks to prove it. But where was I between 1959 and 1964? Religious cult? Kidnapped by fairies? On a secret mission for LBJ? Returning a magic ring to a volcano?

Maybe this is why people now take so many selfies – to prove that they were alive after their parents stopped taking pictures of them. OK, I’ll buy that.

But, please, no duck lips.