Zapped!
"Lights," said my father and for a moment, except for the
phosphorescent hands of the clock on the wall, the room went black.
With a flip of a switch, he suddenly reappeared: a tall,
thin man with thick glasses, standing beside the glowing enlarger.
As a child I sat for hours under a dim yellow light,
mesmerized by images appearing on paper submerged in trays filled
with smelly liquid. Yellow, my father taught me, has no apparent
effect on the light-sensitive specks coating photographic paper.
The unorthodox images which leapt from the walls of our house seemed
as eerie as the darkroom experience itself: there was a photograph
of a llama's head as viewed through a distorting fish-eye lens,
there was a photograph of a shredded poster of a man's face,
and there were many abstract photos which seemed to defy description.
My father, a production manager at a New York publishing company,
perhaps saw the world in a different light than his peers.
My mother was an elementary school teacher with black hair and
sometimes kind, sometimes intense eyes. A generous and caring woman,
she put her career on hold for more than a decade to raise a family.
She met my father in upstate New York on a hike sponsored by an
outing club.
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