Pictures of You: Jim Tomlinson

” Seven Things I Know to be True,” by Jim Tomlinson

1. Red is the color my brother doesn’t see. If he were to look at this old photo, he’d think your blouse was a faded grey-green. When we were young, he’d insist on swapping golf tees with me, his reds for my whites or yellows. For years he didn’t say why.

2. Hammersmith Farm was the family cottage to which young Jackie Bouvier often came in summer. In a nearby Newport church, in fact, she married Jack Kennedy. His presidential helicopter sometimes landed on Hammersmith’s long west lawn, and the couple’s young daughter, arms outstretched, would race down that long grassy slope to greet her arriving father, the image captured by ready photographers.

3. It was fifteen years before the day you cartwheeled across Hammersmith’s sunlit lawn that I first met your mother, this at a Newport dance. We’d stay married thirteen years more.

4. As I ran slow laps on the campus track today, classic rock budded deep in my ears, three young girls stretched at a trackside railing. And when they ran, these soap-scented daughters of other men breezed blithely past me, three banded ponytails flailing, three pairs of young ears wired to tunes of their own. How could I not think of you?

5. You live now deep in Cheever’s woods, a mother yourself, your lawn gymnast days far in the past. You seem settled there, happy, I suppose. (You do make it hard to know.) Five states away, I pen trifling fictions and try to stay fit. Were you ever to ask, I might say I’m happy too.

6. Sometimes I try to picture a world like my brother’s, one absent a vital color. And I find myself wondering if he could possibly imagine these incredible reds in mine.

7. Old photos like this won’t fade. I can always look at it and know. That was you, that daughter that day.

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Jim Tomlinson writes fiction (some trifling, some not) in Berea, Kentucky, where he lives with his wife, fiber artist Gin Petty. Website:  www.jim-tomlinson.com