Blast From the Past

Since beginning this blog, I've had some great feedback from family and friends--you all know who you are. Many of you were there, at the beginning. Some of you are new to our little eccentricities.

Anyway, you may be seeing photos posted soon. Jack, who never needs much encouragement to buy a doo-dad of some sort, has purchased a scanner that turns slides into digitized (is that a word?) photos. Of course, he had to research this on the net--consumer reports, industry reports, Gallup and Ipsos-Reid polls, etc. Those of you who know Jack will understand that this is a crucial and often lengthy process in itself. Then he had to scrutinize Craig's List, E-Bay, Used Every-city-on-the-planet, etc. to see what used units were going for. Then he had to buy a new one, bring it home, try it out, be dissatisfied with it, take it back, lose his bill, argue with the guy at the Service Desk, persuade the guy at the Service Desk to give him a complete refund sans bill, and return to the used sites. Then he had to find one, enter into heavy negotiations with whomever to make the deal as sweet as possible. Our boys will know that this will now become the saga, soon to be oft-told by Jack, of "how he got the best deal ever on the best used scanner in the universe".

To make a long story shorter, he now has the scanner thing-a-ma-jig. But the process doesn't end there. He had to figure out how to hook it up to his computer, make it run, and turn all our slides into digital photos. We have a LOT of slides--when we were young and broke, slides were the most economical way to take photos--processing was cheaper, and the colours! Just have a listen to Paul Simon's "Kodachrome"--he says it all.

Last night, after much cursing and swearing at a balky key-board, touchy software interface (I pick up these terms from time to time--am taking a shot in the dark here about how to use them), finally managed to scan five slides--all in only four hours. Apparently there is another doo-dad out there that will scan several slides at once--he's in the research phase right now.

Anyway, the photos are, quite literally, blasts from the past. Of course we have photo albums, but we didn't start prints until well into the Eighties. For the B.C. (Before Children) shots, we only have the slides.

It's a bit disconcerting when your husband of over thirty years looks at a photo of your younger self and asks (with an incredulous note in his voice), "Holy cow, is that YOU?"

You burst into tears, flee into the bathroom, lock yourself in and peer into the mirror. "Holy shit!" you say to yourself, "WAS that me? And is this me NOW?" You may have thought those morning glances in the mirror to check whether there's toast in your teeth reveal the same face you've had for the last thirty-odd years, plus a wrinkle here or there. But you, my friend, have been kidding yourself. It's not the same face at all. That face lies beneath the one you've got now--WAY beneath--and it is disappearing at an exponential rate.

While your face has gone south, your body likely has been accompanying it. Try getting into your wedding dress, if you still have it. You may be able to wedge yourself into it, but zipping it shut is a whole other thing. Or try getting into those skinny jeans you saved from the Eighties (as a fashion artifact, you told yourself--maybe I'll wear them if they ever come back in style). Well--now's your chance--skinny jeans are back--try yours on--I dare you. Or try running up a set of stairs (remember how many times a day you took these while doing laundry, running after kids, cleaning the house, etc.?). You may wish to consult your physician before this last one, however.

Anyway, back to the slides (our culture punishes us enough for getting older--why am I helping it along?). I am thinking that no generation has been so relentlessly documented, filmed, photographed, video'd, as our kids. While we baby boomers had our fair share of eight millimeter home movies (you remember those--where everyone is squinting in the blinding light, frozen in place because the guy on the other end of the camera has just ordered them to do something funny), slides (and the accompanying rite of passage for all teenaged dates--the FAMILY SLIDE NIGHT), photos, etc. But our kids have lived through slides, photos, videos, and now digital cameras, cell-phone cameras, shoe-phone cameras, etc. Their every move has been scrutinized and documented. Babies of baby-boomers, this is your life! And more of your life! And yet more life!

Jack has been following my blog--he is registered as an official follower, as "Jack"--the quotation marks are a self-referential nod-and-wink, but it's him, all right. Since he's become a follower, he's turned into a bit of a pain-in-the-ass (well, okay, MORE of a pain in the ass that usual)--"Why don't you put in the part about blah! blah! blah!" "That's not right--what really happened was blah! blah! blah!" "You forgot to talk about blah! blah! blah! blah!" (All you wives out there will know what I mean).

The Breakfast post seems to have really set him off. He wants to engage Primero in an online continuation of the bacon-cooking debate. He also wants to add more pointers about cooking bacon and eggs. I told him to go get his own blog (among other things).

Anyway, the reason for Jack's purchasing of the scanner doo-dad was so that photos of our collective life could be posted to illustrate the blog posts. I told him to go ahead (sometimes it's easier to just agree), thinking the process of research, search, buy/return, wheel and deal would proceed at its usual glacial pace. What I didn't figure on was Jack's desire to participate in this memory sharing. He worked his way through the entire process in record time--as mentioned, by last night he had five slides done.

Besides the photo of myself (and his sensitive comment) that sent me sobbing into the bathroom, he scanned a couple of photos of the boys as babies/toddlers in our first house (remember the hell hole?).

"Wow," he said, looking at the untaped drywall, the rusty tub that stuck out into the dining room, the torn fibre-board that backed the taps, "It really was a dump, wasn't it?"

There's no way we would move into such a place now. I wonder, if we were young again, would we do so again? I don't know. Do young couples just getting started move into dives and dream of fixing them up? I'm sure they do--I think it's a function of youth and energy and vision and time. When you're young, there's all the time in the world. When you've used up more of that time than you've got left, your priorities shift. You also tend to look backwards a lot. This may simply be human nature--after all, you've got more material to look back at than you have to look forward to.

Jack wondered about posting these pictures--"The kids might be mad at us for forcing them to grow up in a dump!" he said. I pointed out to him that they had plenty of other stuff to be mad at us about without resorting to raw drywall and shabby bathrooms. I also mentioned that he'd worked hard transforming the hell-hole into an actual house. The process, while lengthy (at times it seemed endless), was never dull. I can put up with many things, but boredom is not one of them.

As for the boys, I don't think growing up in a construction zone has emotionally scarred them. Physically, yes, especially Primero, but that is another story. In fact, all our boys have turned out remarkably well (aside from the odd eccentricity). They have good work ethics (now that they've moved out, that is), they have chosen amazing life-partners (except for Tercero--he's adamant that nothing will happen in that direction until he hits forty--we'll see--he does have three sisters-in-law, after all). They all evince the many virtues that we, as parents, hope and pretty much know are lurking beneath sometimes recalcitrant exteriors.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. As a writer, I'll take the thousand words any day. But sometimes pictures are worth a great deal--perhaps not words, bit in their ability to conjure up past reality, photos have few equals (except for, perhaps, the sense of smell--read your Proust!). And so Jack's project of turning a part of our past that is not easily accessible (you need to find the slide projector, the screen, and the battered suitcase that all the slides have been shoved in, and WHO was last in there messing up his organizing system, anyway?) into images that can join the stream of binary digits ("billions and billions of them" as Carl Sagan might have said) that circle the virtual world, binding us together into McLuhan's global village (hmm--Sagan and McLuhan in the same sentence!).

So the slide-scanning continues--it just may become, for a little while at least, Jack's "goddamn raison-d'etre" (to quote Nathan Arizona Senior). For us, it is a way of seeing our past--did we really look like that? Did we really live there? Were those kids ever that small? Why did the mullet last as long as it did?

I wonder how the next generation, our grandchildren's, will experience the documentation of their lives? One thing I know--it will be thorough. Sixty-odd years from now, when they are living on the Planet Zircon colony, they will beam their holographs into the air, look at each other and say, "Holy cow! Is that really YOU?"