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.