We are rolling back and forth as each wave rocks the Vanda II from side to side.  It is my grandfather’s boat, and Jack likes the sea rough. He likes everything rough, and his scarred hands and rugged exterior are a testament to this.  His round face quivers with a bellyache of a laugh as my sister’s moan, tormented by the pitching and rolling of the boat.  Everyone is sick except me, and our captain Jack. 

 We are posed like a nineteenth century tableau on lawn chairs.  My sisters are in the pool, and my Mother is having a lengthy argument about Dickens or Lawrence with my Grandmother.  The light filters through the trees, and the steady bark of my grandparent’s black poodle tied to a big maple tree, staples the air with sound.

These are our maternal and fraternal grandparents. 

 Jack was born in Czechoslovakia, his wife in Russia.  The vision of my grandmother meeting my grandfather reverberates in the family history; a story, but the truth is that there is no story, only myth.  He “saved” her from her brutal existence.  I have images of Vanda in a kind of post-revolution white slavery (as much a myth as any other).  Her obsession with jewelry and clothing stemmed from her days as an escort (I imagine).  Her Jackie Collins fantasies about America made her follow Jack from Russia to Brooklyn, where her myths were kept alive in her white painted bureau, semi-precious stones wrapped in Kleenex. 

 I am on Vanda’s floor, gazing at the precious gems.  They tumble out of the white Kleenex.  Everything smells stale, later I learn it is mothballs.  Everywhere there are tiny boxes with individual stones: turquoise, amethyst, topaz, and her favorite, the tourmaline.  I roll the names of the stones on my tongue.  They are like candy.  When I am 13, starving for something, I steal a large square topaz from her collection.  I hate myself for this, but it is like my midnight raids in the kitchen.  There is a brief moment of sustenance gained, but it quickly degenerates into self-loathing.  In my adolescence, I vacillate between these two states – starving and then self-loathing.  Vanda’s jewelry and my food – we both hoard it in our cabinets, staving off the fears. 

 I am prowling through the swamp.  Our backyard is a wall of trees.  Cricket sounds in the summer; dull thuds of white cloudy snow in the winter.  The house rests in a gulley catching wetness through each pore of its stucco skin turning green, brown, molten like white lava flows. The glass stretches across its stucco skin, huge blank eyes in the wilderness.  

 These photographs are an attempt to capture and revisit what my child-eye has seen.  I cannot go back, cannot revisit the past, or my ancestors past, but I can wade through the images, test them in the here and now, create a kaleidoscopic self-portrait which I can twist and turn under the magnifying glass of my camera.