.orgMichael Alejandrino
Children of the Sun
It had been a long time since I'd been back. Long enough so that all I could remember weren't full memories, just flashes and clips of memories. Momentary flickers hinting at a time and place that's slowly dissipated in my mind over the years. I remembered the yard. How the gravel sounded under the wheels of my tricycle. How I would sit my little sister in the sidecar and taxi her around. How I would chase frogs around where the bushes were. How I would stare at the big metal gates that led to the outside world. Again, these were not full memories. They were just still images in my mind, or at most, two-second clips that seemed to be on a loop.
As I stood there with those old memories flashing through my head, I couldn't help but superimpose those images onto the place where I was actually looking. It was still strange to me. I was standing in a house in the middle of the hills of the old country, a country I'd long forgotten and yet, it still somehow felt like home. Even though I was alone, I could still hear the familiar sounds of my uncles chatting up in the patio and my grandmother yelling from the window at my cousins playing basketball in our driveway. With every photo that I snapped came the reminder that those were merely flickers of the past and now the house was empty. There was no grandmother in the window, no uncles on the patio and no kids in the driveway. The metal gates were old and rusty. The gravel had been overrun by weeds. The basketball hoop that once stood proudly was now hanging on by a single bolt to keep its place atop the garage door.
I walked into the house and was met by a mixture of familiarity and the forgotten. I remembered the kitchen almost exactly. Every inch of it seemed the same to me, except for the fact that I now saw it from the angle of an adult and not a four-year-old boy. But then there were those flashes of times that my grandfather would lift me up on his shoulders and I would see the world like a full sized person, and life was just as I remembered it. There was even an empty pot that was still on one of the burners of the stove that made my mouth water at the thought of what might have been cooking in it. By the same token, I turned around and didn't recognize the dining room at all. The old splintering table, the chairs, the floor, the walls, the window were all things that seemed to have no place in the mental image files in my mind.
Continuing through the halls was more of the same. Some rooms seemed to not have changed since I'd last been there and some rooms might have been places that I'd never entered in my life. As a kid, there were a lot of places that were beyond the boundaries of where I was allowed to go. It brought a smile to my face to see doors that I thought of as ìforbidden lands", open them up, and find exactly what I expected behind them.
Methodically I went through almost every inch of the old house with my camera up and my elbows in, adjusting my focus, figuring out the lighting, taking shot after shot after shot after shot. Photography had recently become a secret passion of mine. I don't know what it was about-- capturing the moments. Those still images just carried so much weight in my mind. It was a thrill to be shooting this house, because those memories would pop into my head at the most random times and it always left me wondering whether or not those visions were real or just a dream. They felt like dreams. They felt like dreams so much that I couldn't help but shoot photos of every corner of this place as if I were trying to prove to myself that it was real, that I began here.
As I was taking a shot in the hallway and reviewing it on my LCD screen, I noticed an imperfection towards the upper midline of one of my shots and re-shot it to try and correct the problem. Upon reviewing that second shot, I saw that the imperfection persisted. It wasn't the camera. There was something there that was causing a little white line through the middle of my shot. The hallway was dark, so as I advanced I noticed the culprit. A little white string hanging from the ceiling that I'd failed to notice because when the room was dark, it was almost invisible. But when the flash of my camera went off, it reflected the light and came out loud and clear on the photo. It was a pull string. The little wooden notch at the end of it had fallen off but it was still firmly attached to the trap door that led to a new forbidden place that I didn't even know about.
I pulled the string and down came some ladder steps that led up to an old storage attic. It was almost like a movie scene the way that all the boxes were covered with dust and the beams ran naked across the ceiling. I couldn't help but rifle through some of the old boxes just to see what sentimental treasures lay in wait for me to rediscover. The first two boxes were just full of junk that was probably put in the attic because no one ever used those things. When I got to the third box, I hit the jackpot.
It was a box full of photos -- two photo albums and a countless amount of old family photos that were roaming wild and free within the confines of their cardboard world. I first went through the loose photos, neatly placing them down because I intended to bring them back with me when I made my way back to my cousin's place where I'd been staying. Then it was on to the family photo album. Flipping through the pages kind of made me laugh. Old pictures of my dad playing sports, partying and fixing cars would very easily parallel the ones that I have of myself doing the same things. The apples don't fall far from the tree, I guess.
The second photo album had my dad's name on the front cover and seemed to be untouched by time. It was in pristine condition as if it were excluded from the passage of all the years that had passed since anyone had looked at it. When I opened its pages, I was almost mesmerized by what I saw. These weren't photos of him, but rather photos that he'd taken. They were amazing -- the angles, the lighting, the colors -- just perfect. I looked down at my own camera and thought how much I have to learn yet. As I neared the final pages of the book, I noticed that the last pictures he had taken were literally as if he'd taken the pictures I had shot merely minutes before I'd seen these. All I could think was, ìThis has to come back to Los Angeles with me."
I quickly put that album in my bag, boxed up all the other photos in and grabbed the box when I heard a loud rumbling from outside. It was thunder. I was visiting in the middle of the rainy season and I knew that the weather could turn bad at any moment. I went to peek out of the attic window to see if the thunder meant that I should hop back in my jeep and make my way back to the city or not when I saw it. It was the most beautiful field of sunflowers that I had ever seen in my life. At least two football field's worth of sunflowers covered the hill behind the house. The weather was turning bad and I could hear the rain start to drizzle down from above, so I hurried down the steps and downstairs and made my way to the backyard. By the time I'd gotten there the rain began to come down slightly harder and I knew I only had time for one shot. Without time to really adjust, or plan my shot, I quickly snapped a point and shoot and ran back to the jeep with my camera, my bag and a box full of pictures.
Two weeks passed, and I was back in Los Angeles sitting in a darkroom developing photographs of my trip. I was almost finished when my dad called me and asked if we were still on for lunch. He wanted to know how my trip back to the motherland went. I told him I'd pick him up and that I had something for him. I quickly finished what I was doing and gathered it all up and got ready to pick him up.
When we sat down for lunch, I presented him with a book. It was a brand new book, but I had taken all of his old photos and placed them in there exactly as he'd had them in his old book of photos, except for the ones at the very end. As he flipped, I could see his eyes beginning to smile. When he neared the end, he found what I had changed. I'd placed some of the old photos with the new ones that I had taken directly below them. I told him how I'd actually found the photos after I'd taken those shots and he joked about how I'd really taken after my old man. As he reached the final page he stopped and stared at the very last photo. It was the very last photo I had taken that day. His eyes welled up with tears.
ìWhere is this!?" he asked me.
ìThat's the back of the old house," I explained. ìI asked the rest of the family there about it and they told me that it was a mystery. After our family left, it wasn't long before they moved out too, but some of them would go back there now and then and the field of sunflowers just kind of blossomed out of nowhere from what they tell me. The funny thing is that they said that there are no sunflowers in that area. In the woods, on the other hills or the other fields...none. So I thought it was interesting that there was just that one huge field that grew all over the hill behind our house."
ìYou're the reason it's there," he stated. He could see that I was confused so he explained further, ìWhen your mom and I first decided to move to America, we didn't have enough money to do everything at once. You and your older sister were already born and your little sister was just about to be born, so we could not travel just yet. When your mom gave birth, we had to leave you three with your uncles and aunts when we went to the U.S. so we could get jobs and get everything together. After we were finally settled in, we came back for you three to take you to your new home. By that time, all of our family had moved out of that house and into the city. We didn't have very much and I knew that it would be a long time before any of us would return, so I wanted to do something to commemorate us leaving home. I took three sunflower seeds, one for each of my children and I planted them in the back, where the three of you loved to play. I said a prayer, asking God that he would help protect all of my seeds and that he would help them grow and thrive. I think someone must have been listening to me that day."
There knelt the father with his hands in the dirt, hope in his eyes and worry in his heart. Twenty years later, there stood the son...in a field of sunflowers.
I have many passions in life. Writing and photography are among them. I feel that both are ways to challenge yourself at the art of self-expression.