The designs of a teenage mind are something we adults regard with wonder and trepidation. We inhibit our determination at arresting their behavior, or quitting the noise that suits the clamber of lazy afternoons. There is a place where the needs of adolescent gentry dwell. They reside in faked torment, with thoughts of necessity, lust, and suppression. They have a need to touch flesh-to- flesh with abandon, and a satisfied dissolution of loneliness.

When I watched my sister resist the teasing, all the long afternoons joined the fettered line of makeshift graces and rough boys. There was always a shaking quality.

These boys did not quite understand how to cement their attention on her young face, and simply listen to the music of her ideas. This would have been pure medicine, and the secret to her splendid capture.

In the mid 20th century, in America, teenagers wrestled, figuring out each other’s wants and constraints…as they do now…

_{8mm capture    1952} 

We have an ideal vision about men sharing adventures and meals in the American wilderness. There were ads in magazines about similar civilized rituals, making the idea of the outdoors push mortality ever closer to paradise.  It seemed as if the interior rooms back home could only dream about spaces with greater expressions of openness and mystery. No determination in the placement of things, or the cold touch of faceless objects, furniture, and metallic fixtures. The air is free and moving, tracing the patterns of branches, the leaves fix our gaze, with the rising meadows of old hills.

People toasted to their wishes, to the success of their children, and to everyone’s health in mid 20th century America, as they do now.

_{8mm capture  1952} 

There are questions we seldom come to terms with in the way we watch the  the people who are generations older than we are. In our rebellion, it seems right to us that older folks preserve the ideals we railed against, otherwise there is no occasion to taste the tantalizing condition of relief when we are alone with our peers. We are finally able to not spend our energy in mindfulness. We are able to say, “Fuck” without ducking our parent’s exceptions.

I never said, “Fuck” around my dad, and that was Okay. Early on, it never occurred to me he might have said it once or twice. Much later I heard him say it, in the context of his terrible illness, and with a hushed voice. In spite of his age and standing, he was still expressing a subtle release.

He was hunting with his friends in the Colorado Rockies in 1952, and I imagine Dad did not expect the antics of his friend. Dad is not the guy being filmed, but the guy filming:

My dad was more circumspect than his hunting buddies. He never gave “the finger” in front of me, but I now know it was given to him, and I imagined him laughing after I discovered that he captured it on film in two small frames. There is a tenuous mixture of chaos and exactness with young men hunting down deer in the wilderness. With nervous and triumphal calibrations, the errant gesture tumbles out of the moment, and across the middle of the 20th century.