There is a big, flat box which I brought back from beneath
my mother’s bed when she died four years ago; and since that time, the box has
been under my bed, in my attic, on the top shelf in my closet, on the floor in
my closet, in plain view, on various chairs, on my desk, near my desk, and
beneath my desk where my feet could not rest until they acknowledged what was
there. That box contains the
disorganized photos of an extended family life that started even a generation
or two before I was born.
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| The Family Memory Box |
My intention has always been to scan each and every photo,
to create some semblance of order by generation or by topic or by person or by
chronology – I didn’t know which – and to organize them into neat digital
albums. I could then duplicate these albums
with the touch of a button or two, and distribute them to anyone interested –
giving sense and semblance of what had transpired in one zig-zaggy family line
from Germany to America. The originals
would also be put into albums to be handed down to . . . the most interested descendent.
Four years have passed, and I have scanned as many photos
(four), though they had nothing in common with each other – I just liked the
photos. They were wily subjects or
people that resisted categorization – they were better off standing alone – and
so they became just four photos scanned.
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| Grandma Golem |
There’s a picture of my grandmother at Cherokee, NC standing
next to an Indian dressed garishly with cheap feathers, beads and headgear. It was 1967 and I was a 10-year-old child standing
right about where the cameraman is taking the photo. I remember him telling my grandma to smile. My grandma was a fiercely independent and
strong willed woman who always questioned the roles handed out to women long
before it was commonplace to do so. My mother said she
was very intelligent, but had to quit school at age 8 to work in a sewing
factory after her father died in a drowning accident, leaving a wife and four young daughters. She lived alone for many decades after
her children were grown and her husband left her, until she broke her hip while
taking her daily walk through a Buffalo snowstorm. She was forced to sell her house and move in with our family just outside of Buffalo until five years later when we moved to North
Carolina. My mother said it was someone
else’s turn to take her, and that’s when it was decided Grandma would go to
California to live with her daughter (who swiftly put her in a nursing home). Grandma always said she was being “shipped
off to die.” This day in Cherokee with
the Indian Chief was one of the last days I spent with her. She died a few years later.
It’s a disorganized set of tales in that box – each picture
needs a narrator to sit by it as it is delivered up for view, a storyteller of
a thousand words to point and give direction and disclose the real story behind
the picture.
I couldn’t do it, couldn’t make a digital, librarian-like
order out of the chaos of a multi-generational family life. Each time I bumped into the box or moved it
to a more (or less) prominent spot in the house, I thought of all the years in
which my mother planned or intended to do exactly what I have hoped to do these
last four years – make order out of it.
“Maybe when you go off to college, I’ll get around to organizing those
pictures,” I heard her say. Or, “When I
get caught up with the mending, I’ll get to those pictures.” It ended up under her bed where she could
sleep on it – until it was no longer her problem.
Maybe boxes of family pictures aren’t supposed to be
organized. Most of the events and people
in those boxes were never ‘according to plan’ to begin with. Families can’t be alive in a photo album,
digital or tactile, any more than a textbook can tell their stories. They’re
messy and don’t categorize well. Some
events and people just have to stand alone – and oftentimes the background is a bigger picture than the foreground.
So when my eldest child on Easter afternoon asked to see the
box of pictures from Grandma’s house, I presented the box ‘as is’ (from the top
shelf in my closet).
She poured them out onto the floor as I had always done when I was that
age – began by digging in, randomly selecting one, staring into it, asking
questions – or not. An hour or two
later, when the background of a few chosen photos had been brought into focus
and a few things had been made clearer, the piles were unceremoniously stuffed
back into the box – for another day, another year.
I wonder if my mother ever noticed what I noticed today as I
lifted the sturdy box (which originally contained a “Queen Elizabeth bedspread”)
to the top shelf of my closet – in fancy script, the words, Loomed to be heirloomed.
