“Here,” said my mother on the day she and a few
possessions moved in with my brother in Rockford. “Here, take these and go
through them.”
She handed me two
large cardboard boxes filled with snapshots. Hundreds of them, thousands. She’d
meant, Mom said, to put them in albums but had never gotten around to it. She
wanted me to sort through them now, match the right smiles to the right
relatives, and send them on their way.
It looked like a retirement job, I said -- a working-woman’s excuse. But after
seven months of retirement, I’d failed to muster enthusiasm for the task. That
explains why I showed up at my brother’s door one wet and windy spring
afternoon, box of photos in hand. Mom, Doug, and I would go through them
together during the course of three or four visits.
Among amateur photographers I know, there are two types. The one carefully labels each picture she takes,
places it in an album and adds a creative caption, on the order of “With Minnie
at Disneyworld.” Then she labels each album. The other marks little, organizes
nothing. She tosses her pictures into a drawer or a box, where they pile up,
each year’s new snapshots burying the previous ones. Theoretically, the
layering approach should provide a beginning point for deciphering people and
time, in the manner of an archeologist’s dig. But the theory falls apart when
the owner has herself been digging through the layers to see what’s there, and
mixing them up.
In case you haven’t guessed, I am the former type, and my mother is the
latter. But as our day of sorting progresses, it’s Mom who’s frustrated by the
missing IDs and me who’s, well, amused.
“Where do you suppose this was, and what were we doing there?” she asks
as she examines what must be the 37th black-and-white of the same lake. “Could these be World War II ships?” she
wonders aloud as she picks up another in what I dub the fleet series. “This
looks like a monkey,” she says. “Bingo,” I respond. We do not know the monkey’s
name or what relative to return him to. “I have no idea what this is,” she
says, handing over a small, square and very gray picture of, uh, wrinkles. Big
wrinkles. I study it. “I’m pretty sure
it’s an elephant’s ear,” I say. I have no idea why one of us took and kept a
photo of an elephant’s ear, but she is certain “It must have meant something to
me at some time. Otherwise I wouldn’t have saved it.” My brother and I smile.
Mom saves everything.
Speaking of
elephants, my brother pulls out a photo of the backside of one in a hula skirt.
He tells Mom the photographer caught her dancing. She spends a few moments
trying to find her image in the grainy snapshot but looks puzzled: “Well, I
don’t remember having a skirt like that.”
As for the task
that brings us together, it’s not that difficult. Even without names and dates,
the cousins are quickly identified. Nobody but Brian had red hair like that.
Blond, blue-eyed Vicky at 3 looks like Vicky at 51, amazingly so. My mother and her siblings are easy but pose
problems of their own. What do we do with the photos of Aunt Mary, who’d died
recently, leaving no children behind? Do we send them to Uncle Bob, who is
grieving? We can’t just throw them away, can we? My mom decides to keep the
Mary pictures for herself.
The svelte,
dark-haired flapper holding a toddler (photo, dated 1926) is a stranger to me
but not to Mom. “That’s me,” she says, “and that’s my mother!” I am astounded.
I knew this grandma only as a plump, grey-haired woman holding another baby –
me – in pictures taken shortly before she died.
The day produces
another important discovery. Letters my late Uncle Chuck wrote home before he
was shipped to the Pacific in World War II reveal nothing remarkable (“Five of
us stole overnight passes and stayed at the U.S.O…. We went to a Halloween
party and had some fun.”), but I’m happy to put them in cousin Nancy’s pile.
I’m happier still to open a yellowed citation affirming that between Feb. 19
and March 2, 1945, Chuck “participated in the operation against Iwo Jima which
resulted in victory and occupation…”
But mostly the dig makes us laugh. We come
across so many pictures of my brother and the belly dancer who performed at his
30th birthday party that even my keep-all mother starts pitching.
The 1940s shots of her before a radio audience – she was a secretary and on-air
personality in Dubuque, Iowa – get the familiar stories started. My brother
used to have hair. I used to have skinny legs. My mother used to ride a bike.
As I marvel at the
strange collection of the funny, the odd and the poignant over the course of
the day, I start thinking about why people take pictures. Is it so those who
live some distance away can see the kids as they grow and the parents as they
age? Partly, but too simple. Is it to capture and hang onto times that were
especially momentous or happy? If we didn’t have those pictures, would they be less
happy, less momentous? Is it to prove to later generations that we were here,
that we existed, back in 1926, back in the war? If we throw the photos out, do
we deny that? In the digital age will there be any boxes of photos to go
through? Will electronic imaging do to picture albums what e-mail did to
letters? And to what end? I tell myself that photos aren’t life, but I’m having
trouble making the separation.
Occasionally I
hear of researchers who go through garbage to see what it says about those who’ve
tossed it out. Not long ago I heard someone say that the better indication of
what counts in our lives is what we hang onto, through everything. In that
respect, my mother and I are more alike than I think. Forced to downsize, she
clung to two boxes of photos and, when she decided to get rid of those, asked
me to see that they went where they would be loved. I have 43 photo albums in
my basement, and some day I expect my kids will face a similar chore. It’s not
how pictures are kept, but that they are, that counts.
Barb Drake is a
1964 initiate of Mu Delta at Bradley U. This article first appeared in the Journal Star in Peoria, Ill. Barb’s
mother, June Proctor, died on March 12, 2008.