My parents' move from a one bedroom apartment in a assisted living facility to a single room in what is basically a staffed private home meant even more stuff sloshing into my possession. More piles of papers and albums of photographs. I added them to what I had already taken, unsure of when I'd ever get a chance to figure out what to do with it all, or even whether that was humanly possible.
At one point, I pulled open a filing cabinet draw and noticed a brown photo album with black pages, from the days when you positioned your photos inside with little gummed corners. I don't think this was from the most recent culling — more likely the one two years ago, if not before. I flipped through it — my parents as newlyweds, my sister as an infant.
And the above, which took my breath away. In some ways, it's unremarkable. Me, newly five — the margin says July 65, in that helpful way that old photos used to have their development month stamped in the margins.
I'm sitting on an overturned tub in the barrel of a wheelbarrow in a square wading pool.
So why highlight this photo?
Because it's the moment that opens "Don't Give Up the Ship," the book I wrote about my father's time as a radio operator in the Merchant Marine, and the voyage on his old ship we took from New York to Naples in the summer of 1999. The book begins this way:
And the above, which took my breath away. In some ways, it's unremarkable. Me, newly five — the margin says July 65, in that helpful way that old photos used to have their development month stamped in the margins.
I'm sitting on an overturned tub in the barrel of a wheelbarrow in a square wading pool.
So why highlight this photo?
Because it's the moment that opens "Don't Give Up the Ship," the book I wrote about my father's time as a radio operator in the Merchant Marine, and the voyage on his old ship we took from New York to Naples in the summer of 1999. The book begins this way:
BOOK ONE: Out to Sea.
"Being on a ship is being in a jail with a chance of being drowned." — Samuel Johnson
My father made me a boat. It wasn't a real boat, just the bed of a wheelbarrow unscrewed from its frame, with a red plastic tub overturned in the center as a seat. On a bright, hot summer day. We had a small wading pool in the backyard of our raw suburban tract and he set the craft in the center of the square of water. I might have been four. Excited and amazed at my good fortune, I climbed aboard the boat. And sat, carefully balancing on the unsteady vessel. There was a single moment of pleasure.But my father hadn't considered the holes from the screws in the wheelbarrow bed. Four of them. The water jetted up, in gentle, dome-topped fountains, and within a few seconds the wheelbarrow boat sank to the bottom of the pool, which was less than a foot deep. I looked down at the water around my knees, then up at my father, who looked back at me.
This was not how the voyage was supposed to go.
I didn't realize there was a photo. Seeing it, I wondered if I had been recounting the memory of the event itself when writing that little scene-setter, or or just remembering the photo. Is there a difference? Maybe I was combining the two, the photo embellished by recollection. But I must not have directly referenced the photo — I would have gotten the age right — I was only a month past four. And I remembered the bucket being red, which I wouldn't have know from the photo alone.
I tried to do a Lucy Sante and pull all the data I could out of this frozen shard of 1965. In the lower left corner part of the aluminum folding chair, the seat and back a web for green and white nylon fabric, that everyone had in the 1960s. A bit above it, a discarded penny loafer — my father's certainly, removed for the purpose of getting me settled in my precarious vessel. The photo so artlessly framed that the stick of a tree in our backyard seems to be sprouting directly out of my head.The kind of indignity that would follow me my whole life, quacking like a pull toy duck.
I'm not fat — I thought of myself as a fat kid. But that must have come later. My hair, bleached from the sun, blond-looking. Lots of time playing outside. And that expression? Squinting up at my father, not smiling so much as trying to smile. That missing front tooth. Before Phillip Flanigan's mother stopped short while driving her Ford Falcon and put my mouth into the top of the front seat, taking out the rest.
"Trying to smile." That sums me up pretty well, doesn't it? I could use that as a title for an autobiography.
cute
ReplyDeleteIt is so often very early out here in the San Joaquin Valley when I take to line, finding news, and no news sources that circle around to my Midwest childhood and Central Time reality. Your posts are often a great pleasure, but also an irritating antagonist. Both end up being a pleasure. I grew up in way Southside suburbs, and was given a reprieve in 1971 when my Catholic Godparents took me in for a year in Northbrook while my own parent's marriage fell apart like broken glass around us.
ReplyDeleteThank you. Having lost the last of my siblings recently, it is quite a pleasure to read of your own childhood as it confirms that despite my parent's idiocy, my childhood was also amazing.
Great title for autobiography! Lovely EGD, thank you.
ReplyDeleteI don't get the Lucy Sante reference!
ReplyDeleteSorry. Too obscure. The Belgian writer who, as Luc Sante, wrote a chilling book called "Evidence" where he took World War I-era glass plate crime scene photographs dug out of the New York City police department and studied them. I was amazed at what he — now she — noticed in the pictures.
DeleteThank you, Clark St., for asking; and thank you, Neil, for answering. Lucy Sante seems like such an interesting character. I'm ordering "Evidence" forthwith.
Deletejohn
Thank you! Googling Lucy Sante led me to a number of fascinating stories but not to an explanation of your reference to her.
DeleteSo what was noticed in the photos, that no one saw before?
DeleteJohn: It's a truly creepy book. But memorable. I remember how I got it, probably 25 years ago. Rich Cahan handed it to me at the old Sun-Times newsroom.
Delete"sloshing into my possession." That would be the sloshing effect -- a messy cousin of the ripple effect.
ReplyDeleteI love this soooo much. Boy, could we talk about memories of the aging. And, also, how stuff that belongs to other people somehow finds its way into your house ... But back to memories and old photos. Tuesday, we buried my mother, who died in the early hours of Jan 1st, on what would have been her 99th birthday. She was always difficult, occasionally violent, narcissistic, not a great mother. During her burial service we were asked to hold an image of her in our minds. So I did. I held an image of her from a photo I like, taken long before I knew her; the young, hopefully, seemingly happy version. When I got home and looked through the photos I realized my memory of that photo image was actually 2 different photos, I had bundled as one. I find it amusing how sure I was that was one photo, but I was wrong.
ReplyDeleteYou had a really good childhood! Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteIs it possible you were 4 when the photo was taken but 5 by the time the roll was developed?
ReplyDeleteCoey
It's a summer photo. He's born in early June.
DeleteBorne out before 5 at 4 before photo processing? Most developed films within 2 weeks. Besides, he remembers, he writes.
I know in our house, it could take a while to finish a roll before processing! But obviously it’s hardly a main point of the post.
DeleteI have to confess I don’t comprehend your third sentence.
Coey
I have yet to figure out what to do with my mom’s photo albums, including the one with those little corners. Dad died in 2003 and mom followed in 2012 at age 94.
ReplyDeleteI love pulling clues out of old photos, as well as any other trivia that becomes more interesting as the years go by. In going through my father's old color slides, now digitized into high-resolution images, I found all kinds of fascinating details.
ReplyDeleteEnd-of-the-roll images were sometimes interesting, because they'd be shot in a hurry at an unplanned location, sometimes with surprising results. I found a perplexing shot of my mother, staring blankly back at the camera while standing in front of a huge array of Kodak products from the early 1970s. It finally dawned on me that they were in the Wilmette Camera Shop to get the latest roll of film developed, of which there was one shot remaining before the camera had to be reloaded, so now I had a detailed view of Kodak's product lineup from 50 years ago.
Dad was a world traveler, and would often photograph his hotel room (for reasons I couldn't quite fathom). There was one African business trip that I couldn't pin down until the inevitable hotel snapshot turned up. On the wall in the background was an official framed photograph of the local tinpot dictator (posted in every public place by businesses that knew what was good for them). I zoomed in on the framed photo, did a quick Google Image search, and promptly identified him as Mobutu Sese Seko, so Dad was in Zaire in the '70s. God knows why.
I don't know if we're going to need much detective work to pull apart today's digital images, what with AI and other software to scrutinize photos, embedded metadata storing camera details, GPS location and all that. We can capture the old film images by digital scanning (there are numerous companies offering that service), and we should, even before we know what to do with them, before they're gone forever.