Remembering Timm O'Cobhthaigh: Snapshots from an eternal childhood

Timm -- or Timmy, as he was known back then -- standing, I believe, in the dunes of an Illinois state park. But I could easily be wrong. I wonder what is that small box he is holding -- a Brownie camera, I'd like to think ...

Brother Will e-mailed these pictures to me this week. Most of them are shots from a Polaroid camera he got back in the 1960s, snaps that were stashed away in a box for years. Seeing old family photos on this memorial site, he remembered those pictures, dug them out, and, with a scanner he recently purchased, produced these digital copies which I share here.

Since Timm died, Will's old passion for photography -- going all the way back to these first blurred and somewhat-focussed efforts -- has reawakened. He has Timm's Nikon digital camera now and says he's taking pictures of everything. When I was down at Mom's house yesterday afternoon to help with some projects, she showed me a space on the wall behind the couch where she plans to frame a picture from both shutterbug sons - one of Timm's and one of Will's.

* * *

These aren't the majestically crafted images which Timm came to produce; the value of snapshots is not in their craft but for the family memories they vault. I've done a few things to make them more presentable, applying my inferior Photoshop skills to add contrast and sharpness, but these are what they are: lesser relics of time.

Perhaps they are fitting for the sort of family we grew up in -- faulty, earnest, chaotic, difficult, rife with humor and argument and noise and activity, wholly our own. TV families from the 1960s were none of that, they were good-looking and had canned laughter and applause and their outcomes were so scripted I can recite them rote from the groove of everything we wish about family but isn't so.

I thought we were unique, having such a terribly unscripted and off-TV family; I yearned to grow up in my cousins' family in Florida, sun-basked, sunny fortunes, everyone happy. I didn't know that every family is a Petri dish of distortions and even monstrosities despite outward appearances; that no family is normal; that everyone fares through to survive the awkwardness and vulnerabilities of childhood, going on to both resent and revere those first years.

* * *

Timm died nine months ago today. A strange gestation, this memorial, bringing to birth all that comes after Timm's passing by trying to recall everything that Timm was. These pictures scoop up the waters of his childhood and, in blurry, off-lit and shaky focus, hold that moment aloft in a manner which is intimate for those of us who shared that history and familiar for every one who remembers a childhood.

As far as I can tell-and I am only a partial and distant witness-childhood for Timm was the candle he carried into his future. Wounded and healed in alternate ways by his childhood and the many years of his long gestation into adulthood, Timm came to be a wounded healer who sought to keep the wonder and play of childhood intact in his photography, ever astonished at the next image to come into the lens. Timm's smile radiates from these pictures with the eerie knowledge we have that it has been lost except in the images.

Timm plucked his camera out of the gene-pool; Mom was an earnest and gifted picture-taker; Will was the first of the kids to take pictures; I think I got a Kodak Instamatic camera for a birthday back in the day, but I was hardly the shutterbug that Will was. Molly got a camera too, I think, and she would later take wonderful pictures of her kids, having learned from Mom to wait for the shot to appear in the lens. Lots of photos and cameras and posings-for-the-camera in Timm's childhood; so perhaps it was natural that Timm would turn to the producer of those images as his own vehicle into maturity, become the pro photographer, capturing stunning images of beauty and wonder again and again.

Timm knew how to see God in this world: that was his gift, his art, our loss. He may have been born with that knowledge, or he may have learned it in the hopeful smiling faces caught in these images, snapshots of joy hauled up from the difficult changeful sea called life we all must sail, for better or worse.

Nine months gone: grief has its own gestation, don't you think? The absent part of my life where Timm once existed has had nine months to harrow something in my heart, delivering me from those terrible first days of loss into the present ache, ebbed back somewhat, still sharp when I see his blurry face in these pictures, when I think of the family that was way back then and what we are now without him. These snapshots are the best color and focus for memory: awkward, desaturate of the particulars -- yet they retain the perfect pitch of a childhood present and gone, especially so now that its youngest member (in our family, at least), has departed forever from it first, giving birth to a different family tale, a tragicomedy where one by one the cast slowly but inexorably vanishes from the stage.

We miss you, brother.

Molly and Timm. Notice Molly's arm over her younger brother? Such protective gestures by her show up frequently in family gestures; no wonder Timm would refer to her as the "hero" in the family system.

I'm going to guess this is a birthday party, and, though Will's best friend Stevie Brown (center, beneath Dad) is in the picture, Will is absent--so I'm guessing he took the shot. Could be my fifth birthday party -- I'm second from the right, playing some kind of mouth organ.

A family portrait shot perhaps by Will. The suitcase to the left is packed with mystery -- a trip? A departure? No tears on my face, though Molly looks glum.

That's me, far right, trying to look trail-wise and knot-smart in my first Cub Scouts parade, down Davis Avenue a block from our house in Evanston, Illinois.

Family picnic. Timm is already dug into his food. With gusto.

Family dinner round the big table in our Evanston, IL, house. Looks like we have company -- family friend Russ Barefield sits to my right (I'm to the right of Dad). Timm's head pokes over mine. Adult company always put us on best behavior.

That's me with family dog Shep -- Will's dog, really -- posing perhaps for the first day of school.

Family friend Sharon Cunningham -- she worked in Dad's downtown Chicago office -- with Mom and Molly and Timm.

Backyard camping with Timm and a neighborhood kid. I look like I can't wait for Timm to be called into the house.

Timm on the swingset in the back yard of our Evanston, IL house.

Timm with Mom and Molly, looks like our back yard again. Dunno what the two kids are holding. Molly looks like she's shouting at Will to take the dang picuture.

Will with Shep, really his dog. Shep travelled with Will from Evanston to Winter Haven, FL, to Chicago and on to the ports of Will's early adulthood. Gentle and attentive, he was such a good dog. Will recently adopted a shepherd-collie mix like Shep; Dad said of Teddy (the 8-month-old pup) that he had already bonded with Will. "Will's good with dogs," Dad said, and he was right. Molly is good with dogs, too. I've always had cats. Tim was fond of dogs but he rarely owned them.

Some photos from our 1967 Colorado vacation. Here I am on a horse at the dude ranch. I was pretty lousy at riding horses; one day the one I was riding deciding I was a jerk and galloped under a tree limb, knocking me off.