I have been spending a lot of time scanning old negatives lately for archival purposes. A LOT of time. I'm not totally sure if ultimately it will be worth it to anyone, but if nothing else, it's a mostly nice walk down memory lane. I say mostly because there are quite a few photographs of the woman to whom I was once married, Penny, so it's inevitable that my mind goes back to those days when I thought the relationship was good; that it would last. What tends to hurt most about the fact that it didn't last is recalling—knowing—how completely in love I was with her. The problem, though, was that I did a shit job of showing it. I was pretty good at falling in love, I guess, but knew nada-zip-zilch about what to do after that. Which is not to say that I was entirely responsible for the breakdown of the marriage. Our inability to earnestly communicate with one another on a level that wasn't either scoldlike or defensive was probably the biggest factor, at least as I see it. Penny could no doubt lay out loads of reasons I screwed things up, and I wouldn't dare suggest she'd be wrong, but the real answers lie in the twisted and tangled nuance.
Elk Grove Village, Illinois, 1980 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power
That I have had a relatively satisfying life post-marriage hasn't kept me from constantly analyzing those years or my behaviour (and Penny's) over the course of our fifteen-plus year relationship. We'd met on 22 June 1980, married 7 August 1982, and the divorce was final on 29 November 1995, two days before I turned 40. Specific moments—good and bad—replay in my head almost on a daily basis, without need of prompts from old photographs.
Illinois, 1984
Regardless that I long ago resigned myself to the fact that the marriage was over and done and gone and never to be reconciled, I've pretty regularly thought about what might have saved it. I wonder what might have happened had Penny confronted me head on about my shortcomings; or that I had expressed myself about my own concerns much earlier than I did. I don't know, of course, if my concerns would have been heard and discussed in earnest or dismissed as they were later on, once the split occurred... who's to say?
Summer, 1986
As I've mentioned before, I believe that a lot of my issues were work-related. It was only my second job out of university, and it was supervisory—my first job in that kind of position. I really had no clue about what lay ahead of me when I took the job, with a staff not much younger than I and a boss from whom I would learn the wrong way to supervise. My previous experience within the photographic industry was one of cooperation and dedication to a shared task, so I had a bit of a pie-in-the-sky attitude that my employees shared the same work ethic. I guess I hoped they would catch on. For the better part of my time in the job, I had employees—a few, not all—who seemed to take no pride in getting work done properly or on time. My problem was not being able to hold them accountable.
Red Penny, 1988
Feeling that it ultimately was my responsibility that the work got out on time or done correctly, I worked long hours to cover for others or to pick up the slack, whether by going in early or staying late; often, too, by going in after hours. While this never led to arguments that I can recall, it most certainly ate at whatever affection Penny had for me. I didn't communicate the pressure I felt to Penny until—I'm quite certain—long after she'd decided she was going to move on. I was so paralyzed by my fear of failure that I couldn't even talk to her about it when I did get around to bringing it up. I wrote what I was feeling in my notebook and shared that with her four years before the divorce.
Helpless, 1991
Her response was decidedly and rather shockingly dispassionate. Nothing was likely to change her path, I guess. But weirdly, the topic of divorce never came up, nor do I recall that she complained to me about the depth of her unhappiness. Check that... divorce did come up one time, before we decided to buy a house a couple of streets up from the rental we'd lived in for a few years. With my ongoing stress over work, I wasn't feeling compelled to commit myself to the kind of debt a house would force upon us—me, really, since my income made up the overwhelming share of our income. Discussing it one night, she said that the house was one she felt she could afford in the event we got divorced. I guess an alarm should have gone off at the mention of it but it didn't. I guess, too, that I hadn't considered divorce even a remote possibility. I often think that Penny had been considering divorce not long after our son Zachary had been born in February of 1985—maybe even before that—but had decided to soldier on. What wasn't spoken, though, showed up in her lack of affection. Of course, I was too foolish to realize that her coldness had anything to do with me. It didn't occur to me to ask what was wrong. Nor did she offer explanations.
In August of 1994, A couple of years after we did buy the house, and about a week after our twelfth anniversary no less, the work situation came to a head, and without getting too deeply into the details of that, it was my inability to hold an employee accountable that put me in a situation in which I felt compelled to resign. Penny was with the kids visiting a friend in northern Michigan at the time. I don't recall much about the phone call now other than that she was furious. Weirdly, she didn't ask what had happened. Not then, not when she got home. Not since. The following February, just a few days before Zachary's tenth birthday, she informed me of her desire to split up.
March 1995
And now, as I think about and process everything for the umpteenth time, I also recall what Penny had told the minister who married us, John Carson, when we met with him about the marriage ceremony. I guess that at the time, I took it as sort of a joke and maybe it was, but 20/20 hindsight makes me wonder. She said, "None of that 'til death do us part stuff."
Occasionally, I'm asked if I would get back with Penny if I had the chance, and while years ago my answer would have been an emphatic "NO!," my heart these days is a bit softer. My head, on the other hand (hmmm... there's a phrase for you!), tells me, "You had your chance, dude." Of course, the urge is to want to make things right, to fix what I messed up the first time around, but the reality is that I'm only half of the equation... I can't imagine a scenario in which Penny would even consider such a thing.
I've long said that I miss the best parts of our time together. I suppose that to a degree, the photographs allow me to hang on to them.
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