Remember These?
I have made headway in my big photo sorting project. I kept lowering the bar, from fantasies of creating albums for all my children or scanning everything to my eventual solution of making reasonably equitable piles, sticking them in brown envelopes and handing them out the the kids when we got together in August (I’ll get round to that before the end of the year.) Finally I found a box of slides. I didn’t want to get rid of them, but since I had not looked at them for fifty years, it seemed silly to mourn their demise. Some were marked, but I wanted to know what parts of my past were captured in them. I tried putting them up to the light and squinting, but that was to no avail. I know we have a screen in the basement because we show outdoor movies to the grandchildren in the summer and I am pretty sure we have one of those carousel things somewhere. Memories of slide shows with back to front and upside down photos! But I wouldn’t know what to do with them when I identified them all.
I have no idea where I got the camera I used or what happened to it. I do have some photos which I had professionally printed at that period. They are so clear and bring back great memories and I suppose they too were taken on that camera. I obviously had the camera during my three years at the University of London. There are slides marked “Primrose Hill” and "Regent’s Park” as well as some arty views from my residence hall window in Swiss Cottage. The shot of the mail box wreathed in mist is rather effective, but several titles containing words like “view from so and so in the fog” should probably have been changed to “underexposed.”
The camera went with me to Greece and there are countless views of crumbling temples, most of which I had the sense to label with the name of the site. I remember taking photos at the Corinth Canal, in Crete, at Knossos and Mycene, in Athens and Sparta, in Delphi and Epidaurus. The slides were a great memento, but now they too are part of the past.
The camera also crossed the Atlantic and I have slides of some of the wonderful friends I made in Los Angeles. I could just about make out a slide showing Ernie with a horse, and it made sense when I found others labeled “Will Rogers State Park” and “Polo at Will Rogers.” A number of slides of my oldest children as babies indicate the camera made its way to Michigan, but cheaper, easier and quicker methods of photography must have taken over. So I bid these mementos farewell, BUT . . .
More technology to wrestle with, but I am excited. Seven years ago I started another blog, with the aim of posting a photo every day. I had to abandon it because of computer problems. I was almost glad, because coming up with a photo every day was so hard, but it might be good for me now and get me out of the house.
Maybe 52at77?
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