We had flown up to Albany, New York to rent a van to load up and drive south with anything of emotional, historic or financial value before we closed up the old house. I soon learned that the fifteen photo albums that I had discovered on my second trip up under the living room sofa were just the tip of the ice berg. We found another dozen under one of the beds and yet another box full of albums and old sepia and tin types in the attic. All in, there were fifty+ photo albums scattered throughout my parents house. Additionally, my father had an entire dresser drawer stuffed with 5″ x 7″ envelopes of his own personal photography, most being photos to document his many paintings, flowers he grew and tended as well pictures of the seagulls he used to feed in front of the house. (A practice he gave up after realizing that highly acidic seagull poop will eventually destroy asphalt shingles and damage a rooftop. I don’t know if his neighbor, Art Walch, ever realized it was my dad’s fault that he had to replace his roof twice. I suspect not. I do know that it finally dawned on my father because he told me so.)
Kim and I then stacked all the photo albums and boxes of old photos in the living room which had become a staging area. Wow. That’s going to take up a lot of real estate in the van, I thought. Then we vacuumed, dusted and wiped down each and moved them, one by one, to the kitchen table where we started selecting and removing images, tossing the keepers into a bag. Left behind were the old photo albums themselves as well as photos damaged beyond recognition, duplicates and some entire volumes of photos that we or my brothers and their families had sent to my parents over the years of which we were sure there were copies.
Over this past weekend I moved the photos from the bag into a lidded box, inspecting each one before stacking them on top of each other. Many of the older images, mostly sepia prints on heavy stock and presented in dark brown or grey aged and embossed folders or sleeves, were of people I did not recognize. Even the few that had inscriptions scribbled on their backs were names that I did not recognize. I suspect old friends and cousins of my great grand parents whose memories have faded away with their passing.
Of course there were plenty of pictures of people, places and things that I did recognize or remember. I spent some time reflecting on my Uncle Ted Jr., my dad’s older brother. As well as his wife, Joyce and their children. My first cousins. I spent many childhood weekends with them where we’d all converge on my grandparent’s house in Port Henry. Memories of the public beach, within easy walking distance from my grandmother’s, where we’d stand goggle-eyed watching French Canadian’s as the men would change out of their Speedo, nut sack bathing suits on the beach in full view of everybody. Typically the women would wrap a beach towel around themselves first. Sometimes the towel would slip. The tease to a 10 year old boy was unbearable. The mystery solved the next summer while I was chasing my younger cousin Teddy, whom we called Teddy Bear, back and forth in the Lady’s Bathhouse. I ran straight, face first into his healthy Aunt Hannah’s bold black bush while she was changing into her bathing suit in one of the stalls at the end of the hall. My first full frontal naked adult woman that wasn’t my mother. The image still stubbornly in my head a half century later.
I remember early Beatles, the Rascals, Herman’s Hermits and Paul Revere and the Raiders playing from the speaker on top of the telephone pole near the concession stand. I remember walking up the hill to the old penny candy store, and going out after toweling off to Gene’s Michigan Hot Dog stand for dinner. Which, by the way, still stands and still serves, in season, amazingly consistent Michigan hot dogs.
There were photos of my grandmother as a young woman, and an album that belonged to her while she was in her teens. Photos of the old Smith family farm in Pennsylvania and the big house in Port Henry with the double decked porches and giant old oak in the front. The tree I was standing under when my mother came out the front door to announce that Jack Ruby had just shot Lee Harvey Oswald.
My uncle Ted Jr. standing next to his Dodge convertible in front of the Samuel D. Champlain monument next to the big bridge to Vermont, my dad loading an M1 rifle in Iceland, Uncle John sitting next to me and my older cousin Barbara, wearing my cowboy hat and holding my two cap pistols, a tall and thin Aunt Joyce standing on a rock next to the lake. And many, many more. Each photo holds a story. And there are a lot of photos. Making countless stories. Or maybe they are all part of just one, long continuing story.
Galen Edward Bigelow 