25.1.CNF.Matthew.Evans.Chelf

Matthew Evans Chelf

On Being an Uncle

The Chinon is a big, rectangular brick of a camera that I love and trust dearly despite the fact it’s partly broken and doesn’t fit in my pocket. I slide the hard plastic shutter cap to the side with a decisive click. I kneel down, steer the viewfinder toward the ceiling. Celeste smiles in George’s arms. Me dropping to my knee draws her attention from the crowd of family and the big glass windows filled with low gray clouds and flashes of seagulls. She gazes. Unafraid of the lens, she doesn’t break smile or become self-conscious. The action fires, the flash sparks, the spool advances with a funny mechanical zip, and the moment is burned onto film.

Celeste is none the wiser in her white cotton hoodie and plain gray shirt—a style choice that has to belong to George’s communist minimalist aesthetic—and her white and black striped pajama pants. Those, and her purple socks donned with silver stars, were probably, if I were to guess, Erica’s input, who is awkwardly sliced in half at the edge of the frame, though I won’t know that for several weeks until I get the film back. I’ll also learn I caught Celeste with her eyes closed. George, though, beams, dominates the picture with his happiness.

It’s the first shot of the roll. I’ll burn two rolls of thirty-six exposures over the next night and two full days. I’m the family photographer, even though we’re not related by blood, and these pictures are my gift to Erica for her 40th birthday, which we have gathered to celebrate on this rainy weekend in February on what happens to be my favorite place on planet Earth, the Oregon Coast. It’s a tradition of ours to gather here, rain or no rain, but this is the first time we’ve all gathered with the newest addition to our makeshift family, Celeste. I’m eager to document. I have ambitions that Celeste will one day want to see these pictures. I want her to know that she is loved. It is what I have to offer.

I stand up and smile and George and I exchange laughs. My grin is my wink. Look out, it says, I’m going to be pointing this camera everywhere.

“I’m going to get a beer,” I say, and turn and go to the kitchen, where the laugher is a little quieter. As much as I love photographing, it sometimes make me feel like an outsider. My pride is both mine and vicarious. Closeness at a distance. The camera helps me vacillate between the far and the near, and this is, at least for me, what it means to be an uncle.

Being an uncle is a new coat for me to wear. It’s a loose, baggy fit, brown corduroy with elbow patches and a green collar, but I like it. I see myself as the cool uncle who gets to be a politely corrupting force (here’s a bag of sea salt and vinegar Tim’s, here’s a pair of black sunglasses, ever heard of Johnny Rotten?). As I root around this new coat called being an uncle, I do find strange things in the pockets, like despairs I didn’t know I had. Maybe it’s just me being a middle child, but when I watch George and Celeste roll around on the floor I can’t help but wonder—did my father roll on the floor with me? When Erica holds Celeste, I’m attacked by jealousy—did my mother love me like that? What’s funny is I didn’t know I felt this way, not exactly, until I met Celeste, who has just turned one.

I open the fridge and reach into the rack of Pabst Blue Ribbon I bought for everyone for the weekend, notice the six-packs of Buoy and Pfriem that Jean (George’s sister) must’ve brought, and realize I’m the only one here who will drink swill. “More for me,” I say, cracking my first beer, and lean against the yellow wall decorated with watercolors of octopi. I take in the scene so obviously designed to facilitate family moments like these—the octopus runner rug, the octopus magnets, the shells, the glitzy modern appliances, the octagonal, doorless layout—and try to force down the fact I am jealous of an infant because her parents love her. It’s wild what a baby will make you realize.

Back in the living room, everyone has dropped their bags around the glass table where we will eat crab dinner for Erica’s birthday. George carries Celeste, Erica and Jean dig through paper bags and suitcases, and my wife, Ashley, stands and smiles and chats with George and the baby. There’s some light arguing, because unpacking and finding the crab crackers.

“I’m going down to the beach,” I say, shouldering my Canon AE-1 and pocketing the Chinon in my coat. The Canon AE-1 is a powerful SLR with manual controls while the Chinon is a primitive point-and-shoot. I carry both cameras because the images they create have distinct personalities that I find to be truthful in different ways. The Canon is sharp and crisp, I can control depth, while the Chinon expels ready-made family photo album snapshots reeking with nostalgia and a certain vintage hand-me-down quality. Together, I hope to arrive at authenticity.

“Okay,” George says with distracted surprise. He’s busy saying to Erica, “I could of swore I packed the crab crackers. They’re in that …” Jean, who is tall and lean like George, doubles over the camping rucksacks and says, “I’m not seeing them…” and Erica says, “Are you sure you packed them?” and my wife talks to Celeste, whose agitation is quickly spiraling into fist-waving squalls.

“Yeah, I’m going to go down to the beach and check it out.” I feel awkward about ditching, but it’s what I want to do. The cold, lonely beach is calling me. “Reconnaissance mission,” I say. I open the fridge, slip a cold one into my other coat pocket.

As I skip along the wet pavement toward the roar of an angry ocean, drinking my pibber, as I call them, I smile like a free man. The great thing about being the uncle is I can slip out. Freedom is something I could never give up. Having a child, you let go of the ability to walk down to the beach. Being that close to Celeste makes me shudder with claustrophobia.

And yet simply laying eyes on her doughy cheeks makes me question my life choices. My wife and I agree—no kids—and I’m not moved to reconsider. But I am faced with the consequences of my choice. I will not continue. Nothing of my face or my smile will carry on after I die. I will leave no human imprint. Up until meeting Celeste, the choice has been abstract. Now, it is visceral.

Down on the beach, watery spray batters my face and I love it. The wind cuts through my coat; I may as well be naked. I rip the beanie from my head so the wind can gust through my hair and redden my ears. I’m walking up to the where the waves break. Doubling over each other, the tide curls and clouds and flattens and rushes toward my boots. I run, an icy sheet of foam chasing me. I turn when the salty purr goes limp at the apex. Idle tides ripple and criss-cross. I watch the collisions. The foam lingers, rides the collision. Tiny bubbles sizzle and pop. A big wave is coming. I turn and run, clutching my Canon AE-1. The gush drenches the small round stones and little black rocks and broken bits of shell and wood and drags them back into the sink. Because I am defiant, and I love beauty, I raise the Canon to my right eye and take the photograph. I go back to the room.

“Is it raining yet?” Erica asks.

I blow my nose. “Not yet,” I say. “Should hold off another hour.”

“How’s the tide?”

“Starting to come in.”

“We just put Schmoopy down for a nap.”

Everyone suits up in rain gear and we head down to the beach for a quick walk before the rain begins. I hang back, Canon at the ready. I close the aperture with a quick twist and open my shutter speed for big depth of field. I want the entire view. The empty vacation houses. The dune grass, boulder walls, low sitka shrubs. The incoming tide. The headland known as God’s Thumb and, beyond, Cascade Head, both barely there in the ghostly white mist. Footprints of lonely walkers before us dapple the sand. The five of us are but more footprints soon to be swallowed by the tide. I want to capture this moment that we were here.

So I raise the Canon to my eye. Erica and Ashley, black shells with hoods up, huddle along the waters edge, heads bent toward, talking in the secret mode of their close connection. Further ahead, George and Jean walk together, their gaits easy and familiar as brother and sister should be. Jean recently gave up her digital nomad lifestyle to settle down in Portland, where we live, to be close to George and Erica and Celeste. Jean’s sacrifice plays back my selfishness to move west on my own. Back home in Kentucky, my little sister has two children that I am uncle to by blood and yet I hardly know my niece and nephew. My sister and I haven’t had a real connection in at least ten years. As I watch George and Jean walk, I find myself imagining them replaced with my sister and I. I invent a personal history where I can live my own life in Oregon and still have a relationship with my family. I am lonely and jealous and it’s no one’s fault but my own. I came down to the beach because I wanted to be alone with all the lost, broken things that wash up on the shore—the gnarled timber, the boat rigging, a metal bed frame, giant redwood logs that’ve been washed to white bone—and that’s precisely what I got.

It starts with a trickle coldly hitting my cheekbone and then it picks up with a wonderful sound that is like rocks tumbling and then it is a pounding, merciless squall that licks up my pant leg. The five of us turn, search the seawall for the clay, rocky path that leads off the beach and into the neighborhood, and we flee, holding our hoods the wind wants to rip away. The atmospheric river dumps and howls. It’s great fun running from the storm. I never feel so alive as when I’m blasted by freezing rain and pushed by wind so powerful that if I leaned backward, a hand of air will prop me upright.

Erica carries sleepy Celeste from the master bedroom into the living room and me, Jean, Ashley gasp and go, “Hey Celeste,” in one soft coo. The fogginess about her dark blue eyes lights up. Quick, curious squalls flare. Erica and Celeste plop on the gray carpet. Celeste crawls to George. Celeste loves to crawl over George’s long, lanky body like he’s a sandbox and a jungle gym. George’s knee is a mountain as high as Mt. Hood and his belly is a trampoline. Celeste crawls, drooling on herself. There’s always a gooey smear about her lips and chin. She’s on a journey. She’ll suddenly detour and head into the desert of gray carpet. She’ll mosey to Jean. She’ll bark up Ashley’s leg. On all fours, she’ll look up at me, the only one not on the floor, because I’m standing above it all with my camera.

I’m watching for the precious moments. The more I watch the more I understand my jealousy. Did my parents play on the floor like this with me? Was I held and cherished in the way Erica and George cherish Celeste? Why does it feel like the answer is a bottomless no? Celeste, in tune with the mechanical whirl in my hand, peers and smiles. She’s disarming, takes the self-pity right out of me. We carry on. I don’t plan the shots. I take them when I take them. I keep my eyes peeled, my ears open, my heart awake. I attune to the moment. What I so love about analog photography is the absolute dedication to the present moment. One must pay stringent obedience to the here and now. One must forget about tomorrow and the past. It is my rebellion against fate, me turning my back on the fact I have to go to bed eventually. It’s me trying to wedge open this very second with a pry bar. The aloof wing of my consciousness, which is always flapping in the darkness, swoops in for beauty.

It’s the role I’ve chosen and been appointed to. It was I who rushed to the old growth forest and lazy river at Oxbow to shoot their maternity shoot. I who photographed Celeste, a swaddled newborn, whose picture is framed on the bookshelf. I’m documenting the small moments of carriages and messy-faced lunches.

It’s getting late.

“Time to put this baby down,” Erica says.

We head to the bedroom lit with quiet light. Erica lays Celeste in the middle of a king-sized bed. I don’t know what turn of conversation brings us here, but Erica tells me, “The first time Celeste watched TV, she was sick in Florida. I put on Bill Evans on YouTube. All she did was sit there and watch Bill Evans play the piano.”

I imagine her big eyes and say, “Damn, Celeste, you’re the coolest kid. It took me thirty-two years to find Bill Evans.” For me, Bill Evans is up there for top favorite musician, ever, which is a spot contested by other jazz greats, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, and Wayne Shorter.

“Then it was Howlin’ Wolf,” Erica says.

I am staggered by the footing Celeste gets to have in life. Imagine your first experience of television being one of jazz’s greatest pianists, Bill Evans, and the blues heavyweight Howlin’ Wolf—what wonders does this do to your center of gravity, your inner compass?

“Yeah, man,” Erica says, echoing my wonder and envy. She levels a serious gaze toward Celeste, who is being read to by George. Being a parent is an opportunity to fix what sucked about your childhood. I sense this strongly in Erica. Being an uncle is similar, but at a fraction.

“Dude, want to read to her?” Erica says.

I do. I’ve never read to a baby before. Erica hands me a paperboard book with crazy pop-up pictures about farting and I open to the first leaf. I ham it up.

“Why don’t you pick a song?”

“Pick a song?”

“We gonna sing this baby to sleep.”

Oh no. I can’t sing. I’m very bad at words to songs despite my obsession with literature. An ancient terror creeps up from senior year of high school, my first girl friend. We’d stay up past midnight talking on brick phones. Long, fuzzy silences. “Sing to me,” she’d whisper. “I don’t know the words to any songs,” I’d say. “Sing to me,” she’d persist. Humiliated and tone-deaf, I croaked the words to the only two songs I knew the words to: “Digital” by Joy Division and “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground. Songs that are more spoken than sung.

“Heroin,” I sputter to Erica, embarrassed and ashamed, trying to pass it off like a joke. Never in my life did I think I’d sing a baby to sleep. But I’m an uncle now.

Erica does her good Lou Reed impression. Heroin, be the death of me. “Think of something else, dude.”

“What about some Lightnin’?” I say, hearing the distinct cool voice of Lightnin’ Hopkins.

“She likes the blues.”

I go on Youtube. As soon as Celeste hears the opens blues riff with harmonica of “Mojo Hand,” she freezes, seized by the never-heard sound. She inches to my phone on all fours. She rocks back and forth. She twists her head. Her chin swivels with the thumping beat. She pounds her fists up and down on her legs. Her diaper squishes as her butt presses into the bed. I light up with connection. I don’t sing, we all laugh. Erica says, “Alright, alright, we’re putting this baby to bed,” and I realize maybe some rocking blues wasn’t the time-appropriate tune.

Celeste begins to wail. George, Erica, and Jean sing a Beatles song I know but don’t know the words to. Their harmony silences the crying baby.

The Monday morning after I get home from the Erica’s 40th on the coast, a thrill rushes through me as good as Christmas morning as I wake up, check my inbox, and find that I have received an email from Citizen’s Photo, the local film lab where I drop my rolls of film for processing. I quickly download the files and drag the folder to my desktop on my MacBook and get up to make coffee so I can pour over my photographs with a caffeinated brain. The water cannot boil fast enough.

Getting photos back is the second best part of film photography. Or should I say waiting to get photos back? I’m not the kind of person who enjoys the instant gratification of the iPhone photo. I want to forget. Everything. What happened and where I was and who I was. I want to forget that I even existed. It sweetens the delightful bang of remembering—the past gushing up through the ground like steaming hot water. In this sauna, I am reunified. I feast on these little pizza slices of memory, and I cry out, “Oh, yeah!” and “Wow!”

I’ve adapted my workflow to accommodate this obsession. Inspired by Garry Winogrand, a midcentury slice-of-life street photographer, I wait a year—at least—before I process a roll of film so I can forget the moment it was taken. When I finish a roll, I toss it in a freezer bag, where the memories sit on ice for three-hundred-and sixty-five days, accumulating, marinating. When the time comes, I pluck a roll at random. Maybe I will remember the last time I shot Portra 400, but probably not.

Winogrand developed this practice to create critical distance, but I do it to recapture the surprise.

I flop on the couch, totally unprepared.

First shot: my nephew on the kitchen floor, sprawled and smiling, his eyes squinted, his silly bowl cut framing his lightly brown face, his orange shirt says Boo! and the Super Mario ghost raises its white, poofy arms in chase; my niece, caught in the burn on the edge of the frame, side eyes me with her delightful, intelligent curiosity.

Next shot: my niece, centered, caught in the act of playing with toy piglets on the kitchen floor, her eye brows arch like a cat and cheeks swell with her devious smile and her pigtails make me laugh with happiness, with watery pressure behind my eyes.

The rest of the roll is scenes from my home visit last summer. Backroads lined with Johnson grass and fencerow, dirt paths through soybean fields, pink flowers along the pond, flowers in the creek bottom, chickens wiling away the afternoon, potbelly pigs burrowed in dirt, gnarled wooden boards slathered in cobwebs in the barn my great grandfather built when he got back from World War I, my mom, my dad, my Cousin Ed drinking a Coors Light and staring into the distance with that assured stance of belonging I so love and envy.

It was a good visit, a fine visit, but every picture has the behind-the-picture.

Me trying to take my home with me.

Me believing I have a place.

Me facing my non-existent relationship with my nephew and niece and the unbridgeable gap between me and my sister.

Me being an uncle to someone else’s kid who isn’t really my family.

But what makes a family? Is it blood and name and shared history and shared landscape? Or is it belonging? Who I go with to the stormy edges of the Oregon Coast?

I close the laptop, rattled. For a while I’m dizzy with a big warm feeling that blots out thinking or knowing or doing much of anything except sitting and waiting for the dizziness to pass. I’m like a balloon filled with cotton candy, inflated with wispy nothingness. Just gotta breathe.

The next wave is stupefied irony: of course the roll of film I get back immediately after returning from the coast with Celeste.

The pictures of my nephew and niece make me feel far, very far, which is the final and ultimate feeling. Deserted. On my island, I don’t grieve or mourn, exactly, so much as I’m visited by a telling memory that sings the whole.

Last summer, I went to my sister’s house to ask a favor. It was my last day in Kentucky. I’d been dreading asking this favor, so I put off asking until I couldn’t put it off any longer. My sister lives with her husband and two kids in a big brick house we call the Chelf house because it’s the house my grandparents built on the farm with the intention of housing generations of Chelfs. I wasn’t thinking about her kids or the fact I was an uncle so much as I was quietly astounded that my sister was fulfilling our grandparent’s dream by living in that house. She realized the kind of place-based life on the farm, genetically speaking, I was meant to have. But both of her older brothers disappeared into the world, leaving her to carry on the tradition. Probably has something to do with her anger toward me.

I park the truck under the big oak tree. I cut the engine, open the door, and sit in the heat, listening to chickens cluck and sheep bleat, and try to figure out what I’m looking for in my sister. I remember going together on a 24-day trip to Europe. May 2013. Belgium, Netherlands, Paris, Rome, Sienna, Florence. To Greek islands Mykonos, Paros, and Crete. Finally to Athens to see the Parthenon. We ended in Istanbul, visiting the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia. The first time either of us had been so far from home. Me and my little sister.

We got lost together in Paris because I wanted to visit Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s grave in the Montparnasse Cemetery. Neither of us had a smart phone or a map. All we had was our youth and our guts and, as it turned out, a lot of luck. I leveled my Polaroid Impulse at the rose-laden grave of the existentialists, fired, stuffed the exposure in my back pocket, and we turned to run, not visiting Baudelaire, Beckett, or Man Ray because we had somewhere to be. We bickered at the metro over how to get back. The only reason we found our way was because a young French woman dressed in a full royal blue corduroy suit popped her head around the corner, said, “Ah! Americans! Lost? Looking for help? I’m practicing English.”

It’s telling that I remember the words of the young French woman in the royal blue suit who saved my sister and me and that I don’t remember my sister’s words as we argued. It’s like I never listened to her. After that trip, we grew apart.

I shoulder my Canon AE-1, because you never know. I take the cement path through what used to be my grandmother’s garden but is now a grassy terrace littered with children’s toys. Up cement steps, the patio is smattered in red hand prints and purple foot prints and green smears. Empty paint tubes left about. A pink Minnie Mouse chair. An orange cat loafs on a mat. There’s a rubber grill replete with yellow knobs for gas and black ribs for adding char lines to plastic meat. Elsewhere is a blue sandbox filled with dirt and Tonka bulldozers and little orange shovels. My sister gives them anything they want.

The sliding glass door oozes to the side. I step around picture books and Hot Wheels and Barbies as I make my way toward the commotion in the kitchen. Pitter patter of small feet. The sizzling of ground meat. I smell pepper and butter. Without seeing I know that my sister is making Hamburger Helper for the kids because that’s what our mother did for us.

I linger in the dining room. I float from picture to picture. My sister has gathered all of the aerial photographs of the farm our grandparents amassed. Sepia-toned chronicles of the farm’s rise and fall. Some of the photographs predate the house I’m standing in. The original Chelf house, destroyed when I was a small child, stands where the chickens now peck, though I can’t see it because of the oak trees surrounding. The photographs seem to stop around the time I was born, 1989, when the farm slid into extreme dereliction. It’s like time stopped and hadn’t quite resumed.

I’m here because I want to take one of these pictures with me. I’ve just the spot above my desk in Portland.

I tingle with eerie proximity to my sister who doesn’t know I’m here. There’s no door in the doorway to the kitchen.

“Hey Scrub,” I say.

“Hello,” she says with a quick glance to the side. It’s fairly normal for people to show up unannounced like this. If my sister feels any special annoyance, she doesn’t let on. If anything, I’m heartened by a more relaxed mood about her than what she carries when she’s around our mother.

I look around and grin. I let a beat pass to see if she’ll ask if I was leaving or anything about my life. She doesn’t. No one in my family asks about my life out west.

I say, “Sorry I got your husband so drunk the other night.”

She says, “Huh?” stops stirring. “Oh, yeah.” Stirs.

My brother in law wanted to ask me a question that turned out to be a remarkable clue. Apparently my sister was bitter that I was, according to her, ‘the golden child.’ He wanted my side of the story. I busted out laughing. Golden child! What insane legends. Each person’s perspective is an alternative history. It was late at night and we stood in the garage, door up, hitting some fancy bottle of bourbon I’ve since forgotten the name of. I like to think I was honest, generous, in my version of the story.

My sister’s stirring quickens. Gaze gets icier.

“Why don’t you let me take one of those pictures back with me,” I say.

It’s like bubblegum pops in her forehead. “Okay,” she says.

Well that was easy.

“Do you care which I take?” I ask with a tentative glow.

She murmurs in reflection. “Take that duplicate.”

We take a turn around the dining room, examining the photographs. It’s the only time she will volunteer her words. Like me, she’s interested in the past. The duplicate is in a corner. It’s from a long time ago, before things slid into disrepair. The original Chelf house stands central. Barns surround. Quiet, pristine.

With that settled, I linger in the kitchen with my sister, racking my brain for something to say, hoping my sister will chip in.

My niece appears across the way, smiling, but I don’t notice her because I’m wishing for a breakthrough with my sister.

“She wants you to chase her,” my sister says.

“Oh.”

I hold my camera strap close to my side and trot. My niece squeals. She turns, high shrieks, runs, looks over her shoulder, smile, laugh.

Living room, dining room, kitchen, hall.

At first my feet are heavy with not knowing how to do this thing called being an uncle. It turns out it’s not so hard if you try. If you give it your all.

I leave the camera on a table. I raise my arms.

“Rooarrrr!” I go, like a monster.

Louder she squeals. Round and round we go, my chest heaving, my heart beating. (I’m thinking, this is fun, this is good, I like this, maybe I can be part of their life, home, the family.)

A few more loops and we cross a line. She peers over her shoulder not with joy, but fear. She’s running for her life. She takes the stairs up to the second floor. Her father sits on the floor with her older brother. She clings to dad’s leg, crying, shaking.

“I’m sorry,” I say, wondering how my niece will remember this day, if she remembers it at all. “I thought we were having fun. She was laughing—”

“Oh, she does this all the time,” he says, not at all bothered.

Down the stairs, in the kitchen, I try one last time. “Well, I’m going,” I say to my sister. She’s still browning the meat.

“Later.”

“Thanks for the picture.”

“Yup.”

Only much later will I realize I want to be her big brother. And without being her big brother, I cannot be an uncle to her children. Somewhere in Europe, I failed my sister. I shoulder my camera and go, framed photograph of the farm under my arm.

Matthew Evans Chelf resides in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches writing at Portland Community College and takes care of stray cats. His work has been featured in Five Points, Kestrel, Hobart, and more.