The other night while rummaging through some boxes in my attic, I stumbled across a few old photographs. As is my wont, I spent the better part of the rest of the evening with them, forgetting completely about the task at hand and instead trying to focus on a smattering of blurred images that were, apparently, from my life. Although I recognized the people in each picture, many of the other particulars were utterly lost to me. In fact, I had no recollection of ever having seen at least one of them before. And it wasn’t long before I felt my cheeks flush a little as I quietly flipped through the tiny snapshots in my fingers, all the while occasionally checking over my shoulder, for fear of being caught eavesdropping on someone else’s life.
The thing is, I’ve never been very good at keeping photo albums – which is a little ironic, I suppose, considering the fact that I truly love photographs.
Hmmmm. Maybe I should clarify that statement.
Like so many people I know, I despise the process of actually taking photos. Yet I often find myself completely in love with the finished products: just a few square inches of glossy paper that are so powerful that some native peoples still believe that each time a person is captured in one, she loses a bit of her soul. I like holding them in my hand and running my fingers across the image – often times with great affection and always with great nostalgia. But I lack the organizational skills necessary to keep and maintain a proper photo album. Don’t get me wrong, I’d have no problem simply purchasing a massive, strapping album and shoving random photos into its sterile plastic pages… but somehow, that just doesn’t seem good enough. If I’m going to take the time to keep a photograph, I always feel the need to annotate it. I want to give each one a title and then surround it with dates and names and a few scribbled lines to go along with the image so that years from the date it was taken I, or someone else, can look back and see more than just a few nameless faces captured in a forgotten moment that will forever be defined by forced poses.
Of course, this is where things start to fall apart and I find myself singing the familiar lament about a girl whose follow through wasn’t nearly as good as her intentions.
Even so, I haven’t quite resided myself to the inevitable fate of the photographs I stumbled upon the other night. I’m not quite ready to just shove them back in a box only to discover them again in a few more years when my memories of their secrets are even more faded and blurred than the photos themselves.
That said, the following is my attempt to hang on to them for just a little while longer:
Title: Baby Juniper Year: 1974 Notes: [url=http://thejongleur.tblog.com]Someone [/url]very dear to me recently told me how he envied people who seemed, instinctively, to know what to do with their hands whilst having their photo taken. Clearly, even at three years old, I was not one of those people. I’m still not.
Title: Her Hands Year: 1974 Notes: My mother played guitar. Despite her tiny wrists and frail bone structure, her hands, like the rest of her, always seemed so strong, so precise. To me, this picture isn’t about my baby brother at all.
Title: Pulling Away Year: 1975 My father must have taken this picture. I love that it’s clear what his priorities were. I’m sure he told my mother to smile. I love that it’s clear what hers were too.
I recently caught a few moments of a program on television in which a man spent several hours constructing a pop-up paper windmill to place next to a small picture taken on a trip to Holland. Both items were lovingly displayed within an intricately constructed scrapbook full of fanciful stickers, colorful paper and all sorts of spangly doodles which were hot glued just above, below and beside pictures of Uncle Barry and Cousin Filbert in order to, I suppose, make the process of looking at ones family just a little less painful. At the time, I scoffed a bit at the handy crafter, his paper creation and the very notion of being beaned in the face by a springloaded windmill while thumbing through the pages of ones life, but now it doesn’t seem quite that simple.
One of my favorite things to do at antique shops is to rummage through the boxes of old photographs. I love looking at the faraway gray people and places while imagining the hundreds of stories that could, and do, go along with each pale print. Images from my own life are far less romantic, of course, because I know the names, the faces and all the miracles and tragedies that go along with them. And it occurs to me that, although I’ve yet to resort to paper windmills, perhaps my desire to annotate each picture is little more than just my own silly attempt to keep my memories from winding up in a dusty box, hidden in the corner of some dim shop, at the mercy of someone else’s prying fingers and reckless judgment. Such battles are academic, of course, and perhaps like Don Quixote himself I’ll come to realize eventually that not only are windmills [u]not[/u], in fact, sleeping giants, but that in the end… there are far worse fates than to be forgotten.
