Short Stop: Polaroid Moments

L.C. Hill

He called them Polaroid moments. He said they were snapshots. Not the lifetime of memories of a person, but the moments that stand out to you when you look back on a lifetime.

My best friend’s father-in-law reflected on the moment his son—her husband—came to a league football game her young son was playing in. Her husband was in his Marine dress blues. It was the Polaroid moment her father-in-law was referring to. He smiled with a dreamy look and said, “And it just keeps going on and on and on.”

His words reflected my own thoughts from earlier that day. The football-playing son was about to be a father, and my best friend of thirty-five years was about to be a grandmother. I watched as her family gathered at the baby shower. Her parents, her stepmother, her sister and brother, and her nieces and nephews were all there to celebrate.

She gave her son a copy of a book she had read to him when he was just a boy. She’d written an inscription for his unborn son, and her son fought back tears nearly successfully. I did not know what it said, but I didn’t need to know the exact words. In the next moment, they stood hugging in the middle of a circle of people gathered to celebrate. The boy—now a man much taller than his mother—held onto her just as he always had.

Generations of love. And it goes on and on and on.

It was a Polaroid moment. Not the lifetime of memories I have of the both of them, but one I will think of over and over for a lifetime.