Here he is, in a photo on my desk, a sharp-focused black-and-white studio portrait in a frame of gray cardboard, which unfolds to display and support the picture, rimmed by a narrow silver bevel. He’s appealingly good-looking, not movie star looks but a sensuousness and a quality of alert presence which don’t strike me as having much to do with the man as I’ve known him. It’s the clarity of the large eyes, which look off to the right as though toward the future. The full lips lean startlingly toward the voluptuous: a bit of sexual smolder? And he has hair! Already thinning but still darkly respectable, combed with just the right degree of carelessness: he’s got other things on his mind. I cover parts of his face to see if anything of my own visage is recognizable; not the eyes, or the rather aquiline nose, certainly not those lips. There: I have his ears. I search the photo and frame: no date, no penciled inscription. Just Harding Studio, Cookeville in a florid, Victorian-looking script. He is made younger, in his hopeful suit, by the affecting combination of optimism and vulnerability he projects; he’s a young man, and who knows what the future might bring?

In the next photograph that future has arrived; his smile and tilt of the head say that whatever it was that was coming is here, and good. His hairline’s receded a little, though at the crest of his forehead there’s still enough to comb up into a jaunty, asymmetrical peak. The photo is tinted, so his suit jacket’s an unlikely teal, his tie a watery blue and bronze; his blue eyes, narrowed a little, address the camera head-on, the lips seeming less wide now that they’re parted in a smile. As in some old Dutch painting, some antique wedding portrait, his head and shoulders form one shape with the woman beside him, her shoulder placed just before his, the two of them defining a jigsaw-edged field of white space behind them.

Of course what the boy in the first picture was awaiting was my mother, and certainly she shines, in this souvenir picture (Cline Studios, scrolled on the paper frame with its artful little deckle of paper fringe, Chattanooga, Tenn.) with a radiant intensity which makes her seem larger than her body, as if she’s the picture’s actual source of light.