Misty Water-Colored Memories

With this photo project Ned and I have been going through, I have been meandering back through lots and lots of memories, mostly from the 1990s, and posting lots and lots of pictures on Facebook.  Some happy memories but some not so happy.

 

This one, for example, was taken May 18, 1996.  My friend Ron was hosting a party for Walt and me, because we had come to New York with my friend Barb, to attend a Jose Carreras concert at Carnegie Hall.  We had gone to the concert the night before and Ron wanted to throw a party before we left, to give me the chance to meet a lot of people I knew from CompuServe, but had never met face to face.

About five minutes after this photo was taken, our lives changed forever.  Before we left for New York, just on a whim, I had given Ned Ron's phone number in case he wanted to reach us for anything.  He called from the hospital to let us know that David had been in an accident and was not expected to live.  He would die before we got home.

The rest of the night is kind of a blur.  I remember talking on the telephone and letting some disembodied voice know that it as OK to take our son's organs and give them to someone else.  I remember Barb, Walt and I sitting in the dark of our hotel room, all sobbing together.  

Looking at the photos for that weekend, I barely remember the dinner we went to, before the concert, with the Carreras fan club (we were not members, but Barb was), of the walking tour of New York, or meeting Audrey and her Chinese Crested hairless dog "Slick"

But as soon as I saw the photo of Ron, it all came flooding back to me.

There was also a set of photos from the following weekend, when we attended our Malaysian student's wedding.  I felt sorry for the people seated at a table with us, since we kept running out in ones or twos or threes to cry and then come back in again.  We finally had to tell them what was going on.

I posted an album of photos from a Christmas party that was probably held in 1995 for the Ob/Gyn office group I worked for at the time.  Lots of photos of people I don't recognize any more, including a chorus sung by several people.  I remember I wrote the lyrics to the song, but don't have a clue what the song was.

 

Let's see...in this group are 3 doctors, 1 midwife, 1 nurse practitioner, the former office manager, the file clerk and me, the current office manager.  We always had fun parties, especially when my friend Lynn was the hostess.

 

There were lots of other albums, including one from Jenny's wedding.  It was a pinata group wedding, Jenny being one of the Generation 2 kids.

 

This was our core Generation 1 group, with one couple missing.  In this group three have died, one just had a heart attack, one has Alzheimers and the rest of us have various health problems.  Two couples have buried children.  The bride and groom's oldest daughter just started college.  But we have been together through it all -- marriages, divorces, births, deaths, and lots of fun times -- for about sixty years and they are all some of my best friends.

When I got my first camera, at age 10, and was returning from the drug store, having dropped off my first roll of film to be developed, I remember so strongly telling myself that the camera would help me "save memories."  Having gone through so many photos in the last 3 days, which doesn't begin to make a dent in how many we did NOT go through, makes me realize that I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

Old Photos

Ned moved in here for a few days to help Walt with any post-op needs he may have. I put off doing anything, hoping to be of help.

Walt?  He went to the grocery store by himself this morning!

He has minimal pain and the only discomfort is the one he has been enduring for months now, that of a catheter, which will be removed on Friday.  So the surgery appears to have been a great, uncomplicated success.  So far.  

---

Ned has spent the last several weeks trying to organize things and get rid of stuff, collecting it for a garage sale.  It has all lived in a growing pile in the living room, but he decided to start pricing things and moving everything to the garage, so there is room for socializing in that room when Tom Laurel and the girls arrive, at which time we will probably celebrate our Christmas a week or so early.

Part of the sorting through stuff removed from upstairs was the voluminous collection of photos -- framed photos, photos in books, loose photos.  My photos, my mother's photos, my father's photos.  Single photos, duplicate photos and, in some cases quadruple photos (of Dave's funeral, taken by a good friend, who then decided we would want 4 of everything).

There were a lot of photos of gatherings of my mother's family, which I spent the afternoon scanning for the family group on Facebook, since the now 3rd and 4th generation kids don't know a lot of these people

This, for example is a group photo of the remaining 8 at Uncle Jim's funeral.  Aunt Mel had died many years before.  The lady in the pink standing next to my mother is my Aunt Marge, who was Peach's mother and who was one of my mother's closest friends.  On Marge's other side, in white, is Cathy's mother, Barb.

There was a whole book for the family reunion of 1982, which was held at a motel.  My crazy cousin Clancy, whom nobody had seen in a very long time, decided that everybody should be tossed into the pool, including 80-something year old Aunt Marie and our freshly arrived Brasilian student whose hatred for us for 3 weeks probably stemmed from this indignity.

Clancy

I found a book of photos from my mother's retirement party.  I knew almost none of the people, but there was one of the nicest photos I've seen of my father in his later years.

It would be just a few weeks later that my mother would let him know that she was leaving him.

And it was nice to have photos of my mother's parents

I think I have actually now been through all of my mother's photos and albums, which is one smidgen of what is left to do (I found another big box of my own photos two days ago).  Of course when they are all sorted and tossed or not, then there comes to decision of what to do with what is left over.

"Making Memories"

It was Christmas 1953 when I got a Brownie box camera.

I was incredibly excited and set out to "make memories."  I used that phrase in my mind many times, that the camera would help me "make memories," which was very important to me.

Over the years since then, I am always the one with a camera, sometimes to people's frustration, sometimes to their relief.  Sometimes the Piñata people don't think about bringing a camera to a social occasion because they know I will be there with my camera.

I can't possibly list the number of cameras I have had over the years, from this simple box camera to more complicated cameras.  I got my first digital camera as a gift in 2000.  It had no internal memory, but all photos went on 3½" disks that went into the camera itself.  When we traveled, I would bring a lot of floppy disks with me.

 I never made it to DSL cameras -- too expensive, but did buy cameras for their zoom ability.  

 

Now I have a Canon point and shoot.  It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but it does have a 16x zoom, which I love.  It goes most places with me.  I'm not so sure I'm "making memories" any more as I am being a news photographer for Funny the World.

The nice thing about having a digital camera is that you can take hundreds of pictures and only save the good ones.  You never knew what you had until you developed a roll of film in the old days.

So the end result of all of this photography is that I have photos.  Hundreds of photos.  Thousands of photos.

I knew a lot but didn't really have a feel for how many until I started going through stuff in the "staging area."  I was pretty good in the early years about keeping them in photo albums.  As I mentioned here recently, I stopped making scrapbooks after David and Paul died.  Trying to go back and design happy pages for people that I missed to sorely was just too difficult, so the pictures began building up.

I'm very good about moving digital photos off of disks and onto organized albums on my computer. 

But the years between David's death and the digital camera are years filled with envelopes of photos and loose photos.  Everywhere.

I sent Ned a text message yesterday morning which said "I THREW AWAY something!"  The "something" was the brace I wore during a carpal tunnel period.  Lord knows why I kept it, but there it was in among a bunch of other things and out it went.  It was the first item into the big garbage can that I have been tasked with filling twice by the time Ned returns in a week or so.

In the afternoon I went through a few boxes and most of them were photos.  And negatives.  Lots and lots of negatives.  At one time I was very organized about negatives, keeping them all in a box and labeling each envelope.  I opened that box and saw what was there and chucked the whole thing in the big garbage can.  Does anyone even develop negatives any more?  And even if they do, I can't think of any photo from 30-40 years ago that I would want to make copies of...and if I do, there is the scanner.

I threw away a good number of photos too, but it's time consuming because you can't just throw away a box of photos, but need to check for the good ones.  It was a pleasant afternoon reliving all the old memories but I fear I didn't make a big dent in the photos.  I just have to figure out a better way of storing them in my soon-to-be organized office.

The other things I threw away were 5¼" floppy disks.  As organized as I was with photo albums, I was organized with my correspondence.  I started keeping carbon copies of all my typed letters back in the 1960s (I haven't unearthed those yet and don't know what I will do when I find them), but when I got a computer, I kept all the letters on floppy disk.  Two big boxes of them, all labeled with the person to whom the letters were written and the date range.  I think this was also part of "making memories" and trying to remember...well...my whole life.  Maybe I thought that at some point my kids might be interested in what I was like when I was whatever age they are at whatever point it is that they might be interested in reading them.  

I don't think that any more.

As I don't have a 5¼" floppy disk drive now and have no interest in reading what I wrote to someone I can't really remember 20 years ago, I tossed both of the big boxes of disks and we'll never know.  (I haven't come across the 3½" disks yet).

At the end of the day yesterday, I had probably filled 1/8 - 1/4 of the garbage can.  A long way to go and I have barely made a dent in the "staging area."  But it's a start.  I hope Ned would be pleased.

Treasure Trove

First the big news....my long nightmare is finally over!!!  My driver's license arrived today...and it is good for three years, not one and there is nothing on it which indicates I have to have a behind the wheel test again.

So glad that is finally behind me and I can get on with my life.

Yesterday I went half-heartedly looking for my mother's old scrapbook, which she started in 1940, the year she and my father married.  It wasn't where all the scrapbooks are and I didn't want it badly enough to start a massive search, but I mentioned something about scrapbooks to Walt today and he mentioned that there was a box of scrapbooks out in the garage.  I asked him to bring it in.

What a find!  Yes, my mother's scrapbook was there, at the bottom of the box. But to get to it, I dug down through four scrapbooks which I think belonged to my godfather.  Fred was a champion 6 day bicycle racer and there are tons of photos of him racing, as well as newspaper articles about his races and when "Freddy" West became a champion.

But there were lots of other fun things in these scrapbooks.  There was a newspaper article about Fred's brother, Tommy, who was a champion bantam-weight prize fighter.

I looked him up on the internet once.  He didn't make a big dent in boxing history, but I did find a couple of mentions of him, when he lost to another, more famous boxer.

I never met Tommy and maybe none of my grandfather's siblings.  I would love to know about the rift in the family, but they are total strangers to me, other than Fred.  Fred came to all of our family events.  His wife had divorced him a long time ago, so he was a lonely old bachelor, selling vacuum cleaners for a living and so he was part of our family.  But they never even discussed the other brothers, to my memory.  At least not in my presence.

There were lots of newspaper articles in these scrapbooks, one with a small article from 1906 which said that Tommy had received a phone call from his mother assuring him that all of the family had survived the San Francisco earthquake and though they were scattered around the city, all were OK.

So these first generation Americans of Irish descent seem to have made names for themselves.  Fred as a champion bicycle rider, Tommy as a champion boxer, and my grandfather, who was in an Irish trio known as the Carson Trio.  They performed in the waning days of vaudeville and were even invited to New York to possibly sign a contract, but my father was about to be born and that never happened.

That's my grandfather in the middle.  Given their local fame and the disappointing failed recording contract, he had the same kind of show biz career that Lawsuit did!  History repeats itself.

The biggest surprise from these albums was a portrait of my grandmother.  It is the only professional portrait I have ever seen of her, and if I didn't recognize her handwriting, I might not have recognized her at all.

The other interesting thing I came across were a couple of newspaper articles talking about my grandmother's brother, who was divorcing his wife because of her infidelity with three other men.  It was a little tiny article, and I guess that was the kind of stuff that made the San Francisco papers at that time!  This was another relative I never knew, and don't know why.  It's like my grandparents holed up in this tiny apartment from when my father was a small child until my grandfather died in his 80s, and never interacted with family again, except for us, and they were with us for every. single. thing. we did.

I wish I knew what to do with these scrapbooks.  There are wonderful photos of the other performers in the vaudeville troupe that they performed with, but I don't have a clue who they are, and tons of newspaper reports about fights and bike races and performances.  I hate to throw them away.  I guess I'll have to keep them and let the kids toss them after I'm gone.  I still feel a connection, however thin, with those people from the turn of the 19th century.