I saw, for the first time, pictures of my father, aunt, uncle, and grandparents from before I was born.  I sat on the couch poring over the albums for close to an hour.  I laughed at my father’s high school graduation picture, at my grandparents’ wedding pictures, and at other, more casual pictures.  I saw my father in bike shorts, in a plaid blazer, in glasses with oversized frames: all the styles which had been in style in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

The picture that amazed me most, however, was one I found in a pristine ivory album, my father’s Bar Mitzvah album.  It contained pictures of him in a blue-and-white-striped tallit, at a podium giving a speech, and eating the first slice of cake.  But past all this I found a picture of his boyish figure grinning at the camera, with a girl on each side of him kissing his cheek.  The girls were nothing like me or my friends, and certainly nothing like what I imagined my mother would have been at that age.  They wore sleeveless dresses, and their stiff hair hung down past their shoulders as their crimson lips puckered to meet my father’s cheeks.

I knew that my father had dated other women before he met my mother.  But I was shocked to be presented with such an overt proof of it.  To me, kissing was something that was done at a much older age, and in private.  Who had taken that picture?  It couldn’t have been a relative, I reasoned.  Maybe it was one of his friends.  I couldn’t imagine kissing someone in front of a camera.  And these girls looked so relaxed about it, too.  I searched the album for other pictures of them.  They were smiling, laughing, dancing with each other and with my father.  I didn’t understand.  Which one was his girlfriend?  Didn’t she resent the other one?

I didn’t voice any of these thoughts to my father.  But thereafter, I regarded him with new wonderment.  I simply could not reconcile the image of him young, handsome, and dating with the older, responsible, and fatherly man I knew.