WILDE ADVENTURE #1: CRADLE ROBBING
There was Mom, a chubby-cheeked five-year-old holding a crayon drawing: tiny house with five figures in descending height order and a dog that looked suspiciously like a guinea pig. And Dad, nine months old, toddling purposefully toward a toy camera. Both of them already knew what they wanted.
WILDE ADVENTURE #5: THE ORIGINAL PEST TEST
The ma?tre d’ at the waterfront restaurant must have swooned, and not in a good way, at the fashion faux pas couple before his eyes: Mom in a mustard-colored blazer with shoulder pads so enormous she could have single-handedly leveled an entire football team. And Dad in his original Paradise Pest Control uniform, all polyester. Dad supposedly hadn’t had time to go home, shower, and change after an emergency concerning an infestation of slugs inside a client’s house.
Supposedly.
After wiping tears from laughing so hard at the picture of the two of them, Mom wondered aloud, “So, Shana, based on your experience exterminating boys, do you think your dad was conducting his own pest control technique on me? See if I would pass inspection?”
I shrugged innocently.
WILDE ADVENTURE #25: BOBSLEDDING
Dad and his youngest brother, our uncle Bob, had transformed themselves into human sleds. Bobsledding went terribly wrong, ending with both of them in the ER with matching broken arms.
“Hmm, what do I always say about needing to see someone in crisis to really know them?” Mom asked me, both of us snorting at the implications of that.
“But then,” I said, “we wouldn’t be here.”
“Good thing your mom is so understanding,” said Dad before he kissed her.
WILDE ADVENTURE #35: BEDBUGS, BEWARE
Dad with Auggie, fresh from the pound, on their first training mission. Halfway through, Auggie had her Helen Keller moment, where understanding illuminated everything. Water for Helen, bedbug for Auggie. It wasn’t clear who was happier: Dad because of our dog, or Auggie because of her chicken-liver treat.
WILDE ADVENTURE #45: LOVE IS BLIND
My parents at the kitchen table on the day they told me about Dad’s eyesight, heads bowed with the weight of that life-upending news. The best photograph captures the truth, unspoken and unseen. What I saw now was the love knot of my parents’ intertwined hands.
The following three photographs were taken after the mudslide on the Inca Trail, in the tourmaline waters of Belize, and atop the pyramid of Tikal. Luckily, my brothers had come through and e-mailed me those shots. No photographs could have made it clearer that my parents loved life. That was their true sine qua non. Their smiles were the same in the pictures taken of them at home and with their friends as in the shots of their adventures on their once-in-a-lifetime trips with us.
WILDE ADVENTURE #50: FIELD OF VISION
Frame after frame, fifty in all, in quick succession: a parade of Dad’s favorite photographs shot over thirty years, the sum of his photo safaris, his life’s work.
The slide show ended on a final image of our front door, half-opened to a fiery sunrise, a photo Dad had taken the morning after we moved into the cottage. Like a guardian of dreams, that photograph still hangs in the entry. Get outside, it says. Go have an adventure, it encourages. Live, it urges.
This was the moment; I could feel it in my fingertips. Yet again I mourned my camera, lost somewhere under mud on the Inca Trail. But I had Quattro’s camera, which I would have to return somehow, someday. But not yet, not today.
Dad slung his arm over Mom’s shoulder, an affectionate gesture I’d seen countless times before. They gazed at each other as though living and reliving thousands of conversations, spoken and unspoken.
And there it was: the decisive moment.
Dad’s eyes glittered with tears as he stared, stared, stared down at Mom as if committing her to the deepest, most powerful part of his memory, one that no concussion could confuse or old age could erase. As I pressed down on the shutter, I knew without a doubt that Mom’s face—not Machu Picchu or parrot fish or pyramids, but Mom’s face—would be the very last image Dad would want to see.
Chapter Thirty-Two
It took Mom a full ten minutes before her tears stopped rolling down her cheeks and she calmed down enough to say, “That was remarkable, truly remarkable. Beyond remarkable.” Mom being Mom gazed at me as proudly as if I had snagged a Pulitzer. My brothers, Mom’s best friends, the Paradise Pest Control employees, our neighbors—they bombarded me with a hundred compliments and a half-dozen requests for video valentines of their own. I noticed that the only people who remained silent were Dad’s siblings, who looked ashamed and uncomfortable, as if for once they saw the sacrifices he’d made.
Throughout the ensuing hubbub, my father didn’t say a word to me.