I time travel quite a bit.
No, seriously, I do.
It’s cheap and you can do it whenever you want, really.
So long as you have photographs..
Sometimes, when I take stock of how many photographs I have, it’s alarming. There are albums and albums which my father put together as I was growing up. The earliest one I have in my closet, a precious thing, is the old fashioned kind with thick gray pages on which you pasted the photos, and Dad did this, small old black and white pics to begin with, of my mother pregnant with me and then my first baby pictures (yes the obligatory bare-ass one…) and then me, growing from a shapeless papoose into a chubby toddler – and then, over a series of other albums, into a long-legged pre-teen and then a rangy adolescent, and then a young woman…
At some point the albums peter out and cross over into something more chaotic, just loose photos, hundreds of them, THOUSANDS of them, from four continents, with occasional efforts being made to sort them and categorize them. Most of the time nobody wrote down anything on the back so actual times and dates and locations are sometimes probably literally known to only one viewer – me – because I was either in the shot (at an identifiable age from which I can then map the rest of the details) or, later on, I was the one behind the camera and remember taking that shot. Continue reading →
The neighborhood was a quieter last night than I expected on the “observed 4th”. Tonight may be a different story. Neighbors set off the Oregon regulation fireworks, small bright things that don’t shoot up into the sky. We are in drought status here, after all.
