The plan for today had been to start
restoring order to my office, which was piled high with detritus from the
last two journal projects, so high that I couldn't find anything. Any
time I touched anything, a stack fell over. I decided "consolidating"
was in order.
Of course by the end of the day, very little
consolidating or restoring order had been done because every time I started
to look at anything, I got immersed in memories.
The thing that amazed me was the photos I
found. My god I have boxes...BIG boxes...filled with photographs I
don't know what to do with. These photos weren't overwhelming in their
quantity, compared to what I already have stored, but what amazed me is the
variety. I was constantly trying to figure out how THIS picture got in
THAT pile of pictures.
For example in one stack was a photo of my
mother with my grandmother's horseback riding club, before I was born; there
was a group picture of a group of grammar school girls who all took ice
skating lessons from former Olympian Harris Legg in 1955. There were
the photos my parents took in their first home in Pasadena, long before I
was born. There was a picture of the 3 boys holding their diving
medals at a pool somewhere. There was a photo of Ned with Ann B. Davis
(Alice on The Brady Bunch) when she visited the first radio station
where he worked. There was a picture of David's grave marker (before
we removed it and replaced it with one that had both his and Paul's names on
it. Someday we are going to sell this house and the buyers will be
very surprised to find the grave marker in the back yard. It now marks
the grave of some a a cat and a dog).
There were a couple of pictures from our
wedding and only one picture from the reception following our Malaysian
son's wedding. The wedding was the week after David died and we were
seated with some poor unsuspecting couple who must have wondered why every
so often we would get up and leave, one or two of us, and sneak out the back
door and then return red-eyed. We finally told them what was going on.
At one point, all of us, including the groom, where standing out on
the patio, hugging each other and crying.
But then there was this picture.
Not particularly noteworthy--and quite faded,
even with PhotoShop manipulation--but it took me back to about 1953, shortly
after I got my very first camera, a Brownie box camera. I had been
invited to go to Lake Tahoe for a week to be a mother's helper for the
family I occasionally babysat for (you may remember my talking about a
Robert Yates, who turned out to be my 2nd cousin, recently...this was the
family of the other Robert Yates and I was to help with the care for
him and his sister Diane).
I brought my camera and one day I walked down
from our cabin with the kids and their father. We were going to the
lake. At some point I turned around and saw these rocks and for some
reason it just hit me how beautiful they were, arranged like that. I
wanted to capture the artistic vision of it. Of course the
father thought I was nuts, and as you can see, there is nothing special
about the photo, but today, more than 60 years later, it still makes me
smile and remember how struck I was by the beauty of that pile of rocks.
There were lots of memories from that trip.
The parents went off to gamble every night and I waited up for them to come
home until they told me there was no reason to wait up, so I went to bed.
Well, it just so happened that particular night they forgot their keys.
They knocked, they called out to me (and woke the kids). I was
sleeping in an upstairs bed under a window and then climbed up, opened the
window and stepped OVER me to open the front door, then put the kids back to
sleep again I slept through it all and after that they told me I had
to stay awake when they went out!
There
was also the night of the June Bug. June bugs are big ugly beetles and
while I'm not as terrified of them as my friend Lynn is of spiders, I do.
not. like. them. This one was about the size of an avocado (maybe a
little smaller) and was bouncing off the walls all over the place while I
chased it with the poker from the fireplace.
I finally managed to hit it. And I felt
like a battered woman who has finally faced her attacker. I hit it
over and over and over again with the heavy poker, then threw it in the
fireplace, in the part where it was still smoldering. Vinceró
!
I went to bed, having
vanquished my foe, and in the morning when I got up, I looked toward the
fireplace and there was that damn June bug crawling out of the ashes.
After #45 and Kim Jung
Un finish their nuclear squirmish and we are all dead, I am convinced the
beetles will still be here and will make the planet their own. The
wheel goes round and round and if you wait long enough, it's finally your
turn
(OK, movie buffs...what
movie is that from and who says it?)
No comments:
Post a Comment