22.01.10.....young photos

I don't know who has it, though chances are it's my mother. She's the one with the scrapbooks. It started quite a few years ago when, just as most hobbies initialize, she found the need to express her creativity that had been bottling up. It went from one single, solitary scrapbook and erupted into stacks and stacks of pictures that would be divided up into different volumes. From what I can recall, she has them broken up into years, into holidays, into birthdays and special occassions. There's more, but, as I've already slightly established, I'm kind of a bad son and don't remember all of them.
Actually, that's a lie as well. I'm a pretty good son. I'm just fucked up. So, under the circumstances, let's just establish that my mother's a saint for being able to make it through all of her only son's repeated (though unintentional), shall we say, "episodes". And, so, under the circumstances, let's just establish that her son tried as hard as he could to walk in line and to make her proud, all the while fighting the urge, each and every rise, to run.

My mother, with the scrapbooks. She's the one who's got it. I'm almost positive.

There are a lot of them from up until, and including, my first five years. I'm not going to say everyone has them, because everyone doesn't have them. It's the closest to eternal youth you can give a parent. Posing in front of the camera while you're young, before you've learned to become self conscious, before you hate the idea of someone having concrete proof you've existed.
It's the smiles they love. It's that care free expression painted all over your young face, something they can look at time and time again to remind themselves that they have done something amazing. They have these to keep as the years go by and the smiles melt into something else. Not so much a frown as a sign of the times of the lives.
For her, it's the early pictures of Halloween. I know it. It's our holiday. There's pictures of me at one year old, dressed as a scarecrow, straw hat and all. That's the only one I can think of. They all had the backdrop of reds and golds and browns, courtesy of the leaves that had fallen from the trees surrounding that second story apartment I called home for all of those years.

For me, there's one photo that tells it all. One photo that sums up, quite perfectly I might add, how far I am from the young kid that had his eyes wide open and fell in love with the world. That's how it works, though. Everyone has that one piece, whether it's in your head or hands, that evidence that, yes, at one point everything made sense.

I couldn't have been more than three years of age. I know that because when I was young I had this golden blonde, curly hair. It grew out in little ringlets that stuck close to my head. Then, some time around four or five years of age, my hair straightened out and became a darker brown. It was random to say the least. (To this day, whenever I grow a beard, my facial hair comes out in three seperate colors. My moustache is blonde, while my beard is a dark brown and a reddish, copper color. This has absolutely nothing to do with anything said so far. Also, my hair has gone back to being curly.)
It was the fourth of July. For heightened style points, I'm going to say it was the first fourth of the new decade, the decade in question being the eighties. Now that it's been said, I can't believe how very long ago it feels. I never really feel very old until I think about what I've done in the last three plus decades, and then I feel ancient. We were three houses down and to the right from our home, the walk from our front door to the lawn party clocking in at a whopping ninety seconds.
Our family had lived on Prospect street for three years, my parents moving in, miraculously, at the same time as two other newlywed couples ready to start procreating, ready to turn the quiet, small town street into a bursting chaos of squeals and laughter courtesy of eager young lives. It didn't take too long for this to happen, as all three couples gave birth to their first child within two months of each other. Lo and behold, Prospect Street became an instant romper room. As far as the new street children were concerned, I was the middle child. The couple three houses down gave birth to a son in August. Thirty days later, on a rainy morning in late September, my mother had me. From what I've been told, I came out looking completely void of emotion, not even a whimper being heard from me for the first week I was alive. Three weeks after that, the couple across the street had a girl. This is where you assume I had a loving relationship with the girl across the street. Lovers from the moment we were born. You are very wrong. That would have been nice (and very convenient for me...) if it wasn't for the fact that I couldn't stand the girl from the moment I was old enough to realize I could pick and choose my own friends, or lack thereof.
Our three households ended up spending quite a bit of time together, if you can imagine, considering how much easier it was for our working parents to entertain their kids when there are other kids around. Most holidays and birthdays were spent rotating around the different homes on the street. One big jovial goddamned family. Everyone knew everyone.
The fourth of July was always a big event. Cloudless skies accompanied by the New England summer weather (this is almost thirty years ago, before the climate shifts, so summer was still just warm and mostly dry and managable in New England....nowhere near as oppressive weather wise as it has become now), tables upon tables of comfort foods and drinks, and overall high spirits. Kids running around with sparklers, waiting for the sun to go down so that they can watch the city fireworks from the comfort of their own front lawns, which was possible, seeing as the trees were young and still hadn't grown to the size they would be ten years later, where any view of anything past those leaves was virtually impossible.
The photo is very simple. It's the three year old me, pale skin, golden blonde ringlets and all, dressed in a full Superman underoos outfit, playing miniature golf with a small neon club....actually, it's more of a small, neon five iron. There's a smile on my face. It's not ten miles wide, it's just there and very noticeable.
That's it. That's what all these words were working towards, this small picture of me back when I was just a little shit, running around in superhero underwear. That's all it takes, though. This is the picture. This is the proof that I've been in complete and utter bliss. This is the proof that there was life before panic attacks, before depression rears it's ugly head every odd month and / or year. It's the proof that my bipolarity hadn't slithered it's way into my each and every day, before my OCD started to cause me to clean random people's houses, to arrange the garbage cans in perfect lines, to arrange and rearrange all the writing utensils in the house, to vacuum three to four times a day even though things are already spotless.
This is a picture to show there was a time before my mind would crack and the memory bank would be bled dry, before I'd be sick of myself for not being able to remember simple things. But, most important, this is the picture I can point to when I visit my mother and look in the scrapbook titled "Young Ryan. Ages 1-3". This is the one I can point to and tell her that she did well. This picture gives her something to remember that her first born wasn't always the chemically imbalanced trainwreck he is now.
It's one little photograph, but it matters.