by Anna Hill

Created on: May 31, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Lots of girls look to their fathers, if they are lucky enough to have them in their lives, to see how the world perceives them. I know I did. And who did I see reflected in my father's aviator glasses? A smart girl, a responsible girl, but not necessarily an attractive girl. I was too chubby, and in his eyes, or so it seemed to me, that made me never good enough, no matter how good I really was.

Dad loved taking pictures. He subscribed to all the magazines- Popular Photography, Shutterbug, American Photo. Our basement flooded not with water, but with fancy lights, reflective umbrellas, painted backdrops, darkroom equipment, and boxes upon boxes of photo albums and photographs he had taken. If you looked through the boxes today you'd find pictures of my aunt in her modeling days, and of random children long grown now. There would be graveyard and landscape photos- eerie looking, having been taken with infrared film. You'd see sunsets and lighthouses, and piles upon piles of pictures of an adorable blond with ringlets and her dark haired and green-eyed older sister. Scattered here and there you may find a picture of my brother Tom or one of me, but the discrepancy was sharply focused and easy for me to see. Despite painstaking attention to the pouf in my hair and the blue eyeliner around my brown eyes, I was still stuck in an awkward overweight shell which my father knew didn't photograph well. Was he trying to spare me the embarrassment of blow by blow documentation of these awkward years?

My childhood was spent trying to earn the admiration and attention of a father with countless hobbies, a job, four children, and a wife. To this end, I tried to take an interest in the things that interested him.

Favorite childhood memories include watching thunderstorms with my dad from the shelter of our garage or the porch of our house. We would stand next to each other, ears assaulted by the pelt of heavy raindrops like marbles hitting a wood floor, eyes combing smudges of gray before us for a flash of the storm's power, silence broken only by the occasional "Woah! Did you see that one?" or a short tympanic symphony as the thunder finally reached our ears.

I grew up with his music all around me. Every Sunday morning the radio would be tuned, despite the static, to the local public radio station. We ate breakfasts of bacon, scrambled eggs and toast as the Clancy Brothers and Wolftones crooned songs from the old country. The first song I learned to play on the piano was "What

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