From Photographs to Words: No Psychiatrist Can Help

       Maybe this is a good place to write about photo-phobia -- there seems to be no real name for it.  I wrote a book about this fear, an attribute I gave to a character who must drive back and forth across the Mexican border.  When that book, The Coffin Maker (see bottom of posts) sells, maybe people will understand.  Although it wasn't, for me, the way it was for the fictional Flannery Christian, whose foster mother took pictures of the children who died in her care, and kept those photos in a box on the table.  A box of the dead.
       Not like that.  Or maybe it was -- so many years have passed, I can't begin to remember the origin of the fear of having my picture taken.  It might have been the blinding blue fash of the bulb.  I do know there was no one around to take baby pictures of me.  My favorite of a small handful is one of my grandmother holding me when I was two months old.  She's looking down into my eyes, and I up into hers in a way that tells the viewer she knew me first. 
       Now I'm just me -- taller and older and fatter, have a strangly shaped face, and I hardly ever smile.  My hair, which is thick, tends to look, in a photo, like it's non-existent.  No one has ever been less photogenic.
       I'm certain I'll ruin a perfectly good photograph of an otherwise lovely party, and worse -- someone will slide the picture under my nose later. People have to sneak up on me with a camera at a booksigning -- tread carefully.
       I love my babies to Middle Earth and back.  But, oh, the agony of a photograph!  For my kiddos, I have written books that express in carefully chosen words my unique love for each one, and recall our grand and personal times together.  They contain those first photos of me but, after that, it's words that I use to tell them about their grandmothers and great-grandparents, their father, their ancestry and this heritage of loving mothery and grandmothery that I pass on to them.
       No wonder I rely on words -- I've spent my life analyzing writings and choosing the right phrases.  This morning I will drink coffee and work on my next big novel and not worry about this.  Amen and amen.