SNAPSHOTS OF A LIFE TOLD THROUGH HAIKU

Seeing My Parents as People

Part 2 of a series

This photo is circa 1948, the year my parents married. It looks like something out of an old Hollywood movie. Dad bought similarly huge cars his entire life, outside of the midlife crisis silver Mustang. Family archive, photographer unknown.

Note to readers: This story is the second in a series based on a 100 Day Project, I in which I wrote haiku for 100+ snapshots taken over the course of my life. You can see all of them on .

The silver lining of having spent three months living back with my parents in my late 30s is uncovering a treasure trove of old snapshots of my parents when they were young marrieds, a decade before I was born and a good 25 years before I envisioned them as individual people.

My parents met, the story goes, at a movie theater, where Dad was an usher. An usher with a sweet tooth. During World War II, when rationing was in effect. The way to Dad’s heart, apparently, was through Mom’s chocolate ration. Love at first bite?

Theirs was a mixed marriage: Polish and Italian. If it wasn’t bad enough, from my Mom’s side of the family, that their daughter was marrying a swarthy Calabrian, he got her pregnant. So they spent the first few years of marriage living in the attic of a flat Dad’s parents owned in Buffalo.

Movie star looks