"Looking Through Some Photographs

I found inside a drawer." Jackson Browne.

Actually it's an old cardboard box I've had for years, and my parents had for years before that, and my paternal grandmother before that. I've mentioned some of them earlier, but this is the first time I've really carefully perused them. Most of my father's WWII photos are unlabeled, though several have his penciled comments, like "this guy was in the tent next door," or "moving out with 60-pound packs" and so on. Still, the more I study them the more the mindset of this young man out adventuring comes through more and more clearly.

I have some photos of my mother in her youth (she is still with us at a spry 94), and some have her distinctive handwriting on the back. I feel a sense of playfulness and vulnerability in those captions. "The Sgt. who lives next door drives this car for the colonel, and wanted a picture of it. Somehow I got in the way." Or one of her in her early teens, holding a cat, captioned, "Me and my kitty, S. Franklin Delano. The 'S' stands for smart, and he is."

Other photos, though uncaptioned, have become clear to me, and I can put names to faces with reasonable certainty, spanning maybe 70 years back. The cars, of course are especially distinctive; there is, for example, a photo my mother proudly holding the infant me, and in the background a 1953 Plymouth -- in those years my father would get a new "company car" every year, which he was free to use for personal purposes whenever he was not out on the road getting bids for plumbing projects. I vaguely recall that car, specifically that is that pale green color of that era, and for the longest time I though each make of car had its own distinctive color.

There is a photo of my sister at one year, gaping at the camera from the seat of an upholstered chair. There's something universal and timeless about every infant, but that chair and its slipcover, I cannot believe now it was part of my everyday life. Or the phones that sometimes show up, the old black phone without even a dial. All incidental background details look like a movie carefully set to look like the early 1950s. Only they are not a set, they were real, I lived then, but I'll be damned if I can even come close to imagining again what it was like.

For the first time I understand that even if I could go back in time, I couldn't make it work. My memory has smoothed it all out, so that those memories don't jar irreconcilably with my present. And I truly appreciate L.P. Hartley's observation that the "past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." I realize now that, for the longest time, I unconsciously believed that I could, somehow, someday, some way, return to some of those times I treasured.

But I can't. I cannot. That stone-cold realization hurts, hangs heavy on my heart. When memories become untethered wisps of recollection instead of real existence, something is seriously lost.

It's hard to say goodbye to the past and really mean it. This time I do, and having done so I sit, blinking at the bright reality of the present, and realize what's gone.

These days, this present time, is its own world of wonder and experiences for most of you, but it's not really mine. My reality was in those gone times, and now those are really gone for me. I sit here now in the cold shadow of existence, the light of the past extinguished forever.

And also with a sense of freedom. I can look more easily into my own soul, and at the wider world around me.
I find that exhilarating, this opportunity to learn who I really am, free of the context (and constraints) of a particular set of social mores.

If that makes sense.

After all, this is my 200th blog post, so I've tried to make it a good one.

GL