On A Photograph of My Father

Eileen Manion

One of the most valuable things inherited from my paternal grandmother was a small photo of my father stuck into a cheap plastic frame. It had graced a side table in her living room evet since I could remember.

It was a studio portrait, a black and white photo taken when he graduated in engineering from Lehigh University around 1940.

Arms folded in front of him, he stares at the viewer with a serious-young-man look, perhaps undermined with a hint of a smile. Irony there? I’d like to think so, but have no evidence. Except perhaps in my own predilections.

But when you turn the frame around, you see a holy card of a simpering androgynous angel, complete with halo. Eyes cast down, hands folded in prayer, it suggested to my childish mind that my father, gone to heaven, had metamorphosed into my guardian angel, a belief I secretly entertained for several years.

Where did that angel come from?

According to what I was taught in Catholic school, each of us has a guardian angel appointed by God when we’re born The angel is invisible, of course, but always present to watch what we’re doing, keep us safe, give us good advice.

An idealized father?