Runnin With My Sisters

I don't have a single memory from before kindergarten.

I grew up without a father, and no photographs were taken of those early years. No record of what I looked like at two, three, or four. No visual proof that I existed before I was old enough to remember existing. When I try to reach back that far, there's nothing there.

I decided Emma would never have that problem.

For the past five years, during the first week of August, I've taken my granddaughter to Port Hueneme Pier. Same week. Same time — one in the afternoon, so the light falls the same way it did the year before. Same pier. Same boards stretching out toward the horizon. And I photograph her running.

She was eighteen months old the first time. Yesterday she was five and a half.

What you're looking at in this photograph is all five of those Augusts at once. Five versions of the same girl, composited into a single frame — toddling on the left, running full speed on the right, every version of her that has existed so far moving together down the same pier toward the same horizon.

Same DNA. Same girl. Five years of becoming.

I call it my Unrememberable Life project. The years nobody can usually recall. The foundation years. The ones that form you before you're old enough to know you're being formed.

Someday Emma will want to know what she was like. She'll ask the questions we all eventually ask — what was I like? Who was I before I became who I am? And unlike me, she'll have answers. She'll have this.

There's no mileage in regret and no real profit in nostalgia for its own sake. I can't go back and create photographs of my own missing years. But I can make sure hers aren't missing.

So I show up every August with a camera. Same pier. One in the afternoon. Keeping the record that nobody kept for me.

She's probably been the most photographed child since Shirley Temple.

I'm completely fine with that.