Closing out this week I finished two things.
The first was going through a large box of photos that had been stored at my stepdad’s place. He died, sadly, in 2021 nine years after my mother. The box was passed on to me, but I only just started going through the photos now. What a rabbit hole.
The second was finishing Steve Martin’s book, Born Standing Up. In this book he recounts the journey of his stand-up comedy career. It’s a good read. I was blown away, though, at the measure and depth of detail. Who said what when. Dates, places, times. All from his early childhood through 1981. Over 30 years, maybe? Crap, I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast yesterday.
Then I read the acknowledgments. This I hardly ever do. There he writes:
“Twenty years ago, I looked at the collected flotsam of my life and sent it off to an archivist, Candace Bothwell, who did an outstanding job of sequencing and preserving whatever she could. Later, I collected other cardboard boxes from my parents’ house, some moldy from garage floods. Inside were sedimentary layers of collected junk, ephemera, snapshots, and yellowed newspaper clippings. Like a geologist, I was sometimes able to date items by their position in the stack. As much as I enjoyed the writing of this book, researching it was a new thrill for me. Finding a photo that confirmed a dim recollection of days gone by hooked me on the detective work, and the legwork – marching from my desk back and forth to the archival boxes – gave me something to do besides type, think, worry and cry.”
Two thoughts about this. One, I feel a little better about my caving memory. Perhaps, there is so much in it retrieval is like doing a google search on a dial up connection. Two, I wonder if there is another coming of age stage in our lives. A time when the exertion of work and family become less intense and there is space for reflection. Where we feel the need to examine our lives in the context of where we came from. When searching through the “ephemera “and the “snapshots” become important.
As I have been scanning and sending on photos to family members it occurred to me, as memories triggered and aha moments surfaced, the significance of the person behind the camera before our smart phones cameras were ubiquitous.
Decades ago, there would be that person in a family that stepped out of the moment to capture it for everyone else. I think that person was often unappreciated and occasionally thought of as an intrusive nuisance. At least before social media made everyone want to be in frame.
In our family, on my mother’s side and generation, that person is my uncle. He is a solid and steady man. His family is his assignment, and he took that seriously in every way including documenting both the important and mundane events in our lives for posterity in photos.
My aunt was the family archivist. She complied a detailed history with family tree long before Ancestry.com existed. She typed it out old school -carbon paper copied and corrected with white out. She bound up copies and distributed them among nine siblings with love and a sense of accomplishment. She felt largely unappreciated for her opus by her brothers and sisters, but I have to tell you, at least one of my kids has studied this record eagerly. Probing for scandal or triumph in her long past relatives lives, maybe. I don’t think the motives matter. It comes down to searching for context.
Now Google has taken the place of our family archivists, sorting and time-stamping the photographs we phone snap sometimes mindfully and many times not and cloud keeping our DocuSigned records.
But the people in our family group chat, mostly our kids, seem to be appreciating the photo record of our collective past. Some of those photos were taken before cameras were universal accessories in families and it did not occur to most of us to take themselves a step outside the experience to capture it through a lens for everyone else.
Steve Martin, in the Beforehand of his book talks about his years doing stand-up comedy in phases – learning, refining and success. And he works this out by drilling down into his personal archive.
I love this.
So a shout out to my uncle and aunt and all the other people out there who made the effort keep my family history and memories breathing. For context, learning, refining.
Update From Potatoland
Our little plot is doing well. Some slug damage to the leaves but nothing serious. Redbird Farm 1.0
