Task: 1. What textual and contextual elements indicate this column's particular audience?
2. Identify what you believe to be Murray's central argument. Where does hisargument become clear?How do the essay'sdetails and their arrangement, diction, tone, and structure contribute to its argument?
3. What explicit statements does Murray make about photographs? How do these statements contribute to the essay's purpose, if at all?
4. What is the importance ofMurray's use of antithesis in the essay? How do such juxtapositions jibe with his argument?
5. How does Murray's comment on our "ability to stop time in this way" mesh with the inclusion of the photograph?How does the commentdeepen our understanding of his argument?
6. Examine the photograph on page 20. How does the presence oft h e photograph itself contribute to Murray's effort to communicate? How, if at all, would the absence of the photograph change the essay's argument?
7. Consider the placement of the photograph in relation to the words of this text. What is the impact of presenting the image immediately following the essay's title? How would placing the photograph immediately after the essay rather than just before its opening paragraph alter your experience of the whole text?
8. Speculate: howwould theabsence ofa captionalter yourreading of or response to the essay?
9. Respond: how would replacing the existing caption with each oft h e following captions affect your reading?
"Paratrooper Donald M. Murray, 1944" "The Stranger in England, 1944"
"A soldier in rakish disregard..."
10. How would using the photograph below, either as a substitute for or in addition to the one that appears on page 20, alter your experience of Murray's essay? How would the inclusion ofaphotograph of the author as achild ni the costumeofa "cowboy, pilot, or Indian chief" affect your reading?

Use this text to help complete the task: I was never one to make a big deal over snap-
shots; I never spent long evenings with the family 
photograph album. Let's get on with the living. To 
heck with yesterday, what are we going to do to-
morrow? But with the accumulation of yesterdays 
and the possibility of shrinking tomorrows, I frid 
myself returning, as I suspect many over 60s do, 
for a second glance and a third at family photos 
that snatch a moment from time. 
In looking at mine, I become aware that it is so re-
cent in the stretch of man's history that we have been 
able to stop time in this way and hold still for reflec-
tion. Vermeer is one of my favorite painters because 
of that sense of suspended time, with both clock and 
calendar held so wonderfully, so tenibly syll. 
The people in the snapshots are all strangers. 
My parents younc, caught before I arrived or as 
they were when I saw them as towerinc grown-ups. They seemed so old then and so young now. 
And I am, to me, the strangest of all. 
There is a photograph of me on a tricycle 
before the duplex on Grand View Avenue in 
Wollaston I hardly remember; in another I am 
dressed in a seersucker sailor suit when I was 5 
and lived in a Cincinnati hotel. I cannot remem-
ber the suit but even now, studying the snapshot, 
I am drunk on the memory of its peculiar odor 
and time is erased. 
In the snapshots I pass from chubby to skin-
ny and, unfortunately, ended up a chub. Look-
ing at the grown-ups in the snapshots I should 
have known. 
In other snapshots, I am cowboy, pilot, Indian 
chief; I loved to dress up to become what I was 
not, and suspect I still am a wearer of masks 
and costumes.

It would be socially appropriate to report on 
this day that I contemplate all those who are gone, 
but the truth is that my eyes are drawn back to 
 pictures of my stranger self. 
And the picture that haunts me the most is one 
not in costume but in the uniformI proudly earned 
in World War II. I believe it was taken in England 
from the design of the barracks behind me. I have 
 taken off the ugly steelframed GI glasses, a touch 
of dishonesty for the girl who waited at home. 
My overseas cap with its airborne insignia is 
tugged down over my right eye, my right shoul-
der in the jump jacket is lower because I have my 
 left hand in my pocket in rakish disregard for the 
regulation that a soldier in that war could never, 
ever stick a hand in a pocket. 
The pockets that are empty in the photograph 
will soon bulge with hand grenades, extra am-
 munition, food, and many of the gross of con-
doms we were issued before a combat jump. 
This GI item was more a matter of industrial 
merchandising than soldierly dreaming—or 
frontline reality. 
 The soldier smiles as if he knew his innocence 
and is both eager for its loss and nostalgic for 
those few years of naiveté behind him. 
I try once more to enter the photograph and be-
come what I was that day when autumn sunlight 
 dappled the barracks wall and I was so eager to 
experience the combat my father wanted so much 
for me. He had never made it to the trenches over 
there in his war. 
When that photograph was taken, my father 
 still had dreams of merchandising glory, of a store 
with an awning that read Murray & Son. I had 
not yet become the person who had to nod yes 
at MGH when my father asked if he had cancer, 
to make the decision against extraordinary means 
 after his last heart attack. When this photo was taken, he had not yet grown old, his collars large, 
his step hesitant, his shoes unshined. 
Mother was still alive, and her mother who re-
ally raised me had not died as I was to learn in a 
letter I received at the front. The girl who wrote 
every day and for whom the photo was taken had 
not yet become my wife, and we had not yet been 
the first in our families to divorce two years later. 
I had not yet seen my first dead soldier, had not 
yet felt the earth beneath me become a trampoline 
as the shells of a rolling barrage marched across 
our position. 
I had no idea my life would become as won-
derful or as terrible as it has been; that I would 
remarry, have three daughters and outlive one. I 
could not have imagined that I actually would be 
able to become a writer and eat —even overeat. I 
simply cannot re-create my snapshot innocence. 
I had not had an easy or happy childhood, I 
had done well at work but not at school; I was not 
Mr. Pollyanna, but life has been worse and far bet-
ter than I could have imagined. 
Over 60 we are fascinated by the mystery of 
our life, why roads were taken and not taken, 
and our children encourage this as they develop 
a sense of family history. A daughter discovers a 
letter from the soldier in the photograph in Eng-
land and another written less than a year later, 
on V-E day. She is surprised at how much I have 
aced. I am not. 
I would not wish for a child or grandchild of 
mine to undergo the blood test of war my father 
so hoped I would face as he had not. In photos 
taken not so many years later I have a streak of 
white hair. It is probably genetic but I imagine it 
is the shadow of a bullet that barely passed meby, 
and I find I cannot enter the snapshot of the smil-
ing soldier who is still sfranger to me, still inno-
cent of the heroic harm man can deliver to man.