Tonight I went to Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church to see a performance of the Atlanta Schola Cantorum; it was the first of their concerts I've been to in a while, but probably the 15th or 20th time I've seen them. It was a wonderful performance. Here are some of the pictures I took:
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| A "soothing catharsis to the troubles of life in the world today" indeed! |
As of just a few days ago, it's been nine years – nine years; almost a decade! – since my cousin Sharon (in this picture from half a century ago only about nine years old herself) departed this plane of existence for the afterlife after a year-long battle with brain cancer.
It's hard to believe Sharon's been gone for that long, but in a way it's also hard to believe that there once was a 1972; when Sharon was only nine (or ten, depending on when this picture was taken) and my brother Jeff (shown here cutely wearing Sharon's sandal) was still in diapers.
I don't know the story behind this picture, beyond the obvious: Sharon put her sandal on Jeff, which Mom thought was cute so she took a picture of it. There are pillows, bed pillows, on the sofa behind them; had someone spent the night with us? Had Danelle come over to visit Mom and brought her kids? (At this point, Danelle had only two kids, Sharon and Catherine; Heather hadn't yet been born.) Were Catherine and I down in the basement playing, as I remember doing often when she came over?
This would have been our house in Clarkston, shortly before we moved briefly to Maryland for Dad's job and then returned, nine months later, not happy being so far away from family and friends and the part of the world we (or at least Mom and Dad) knew and felt comfortable in, and moved into the house in Lilburn.
What strikes me now, looking at this fifty-five-year-old picture of me (before I had even had my first birthday!) and my grandfather, my father's father, who has been gone now for more than thirty years, is that he was younger in this picture (by a few months, anyway) than I am now as I write this.
I realize that's the kind of thing I always say in these musings: "Hey, look how young everybody used to be! We aren't that young anymore!" And it's always true. As Mitch Hedburg once said, every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger. But sometimes, pictures show you when you were really younger, and they also show other people when they were much younger, too, maybe even younger than you are now, as is the case here.
The other thing (or at least one other thing) that strikes me, is that my grandfather always looked like this. He may have looked a little younger when he was younger, and a little older when he was older, but he always looked like this--and dressed like this, too.
This afternoon J. and I went to Stone Mountain Park, mostly to walk around for a while in the Historic Square (or "the Old Houses," as we call them).
Here are some of the pictures I took there, in black and white.
Elyse complains that it doesn't snow enough down here in Georgia, and it's true that it doesn't snow that much. But it does snow sometimes, and sometimes the snow even sticks and accumulates enough to make a snowman, or at least a giant snowball, as proven by this forty-five year old photograph.
You can't see Jeff at all in this picture, so enveloped by winter clothing was he, but that's him there beside me, looking more like a Jawa than a younger brother. You can see my dog, Pookie, who was even smaller than I remember, and who looks like he didn't want to be held then, or maybe didn't want to be placed atop a giant snowball. You can also see some of the original siding of the house, which was green and has since been replaced by something that I think is vinyl (though I'm not positive since my parents sold the house 28 years ago, and it was someone else who replaced it) and is sort of yellowish. And if you look closely at the window on the very right side of the frame, you can see the window-unit air conditioner, which for all of my youth was all the air conditioning we had (and more air conditioning than some people had). Man, when it was hot outside, cranking that thing up and closing all the doors so the living room got really cool was heaven!
I don't remember this picture being taken (it was probably Mom who took it), or this day, or this snow. I don't know if this was a weekday and school was canceled because of the weather (and, here in Georgia, at least, whenever it snows this much, you can be sure school will be canceled), or if this was a weekend. I don't even particularly remember it snowing very often when I was a kid–and it probably didn't; we just have pictures like this because that's when Mom was most inclined to take pictures.
But I do remember being a kid, and playing with Jeff and Pookie in the backyard, and I'm grateful I had that, and that I have these photographs to remind me of that time.
Today I went to Stone Mountain to walk around for a while. Here are some of the pictures I took while I was there:
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| These are drones being set up for tonight's laser show |
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| This hexagonal structure (is it actually hexagonal? I'm not sure!) is where the Carillon player sits to play it |
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| This is the controller for the Carillon, but in this picture the keyboard is covered by that roll-top desk-looking thingy. |
I had a birthday recently, and I turned the age that happens to be the age I was in these pictures multiplied by two. Yes, when these pictures were taken, 28 years ago, I was 28. Now I'm 56.
Or to say the same thing a different way, these pictures were taken half my lifetime ago.
Wow!
When these pictures were taken, I lived in an apartment off of Holcomb Bridge Road in Roswell (one of these pictures was taken outside of that apartment, one of them inside it; both were probably taken by my friend Pearl, with whom I shared the apartment); just a few months later I bought my house in Lawrenceville and moved. Four years later I met Anna, and six years after these pictures were taken – only six years! – Anna and I got married.
It all seems (as I've said before about other matters) both like a million years ago and like yesterday.
(Sigh…)
But right now I want to focus on the T-shirts I'm wearing in these pictures: I remember that Lorax T-shirt, though I don't remember where I got it, and I also remember that Cindy Brady T-shirt, but I do know where that one came from.
Through the whole decade of the 1990s, I worked for ExecuTrain Corporation – one of the best jobs I've ever had – and my bosses at ExecuTrain often rewarded us for good work with tickets to various things. For example, in 1992 or so I saw Brigadoon at the Fox because I had done a good job on something or other and they gave me two tickets to go see it. I barely remember it, but it starred John Schneider (a name you might recognize from "The Dukes of Hazzard," a show I'm a little embarrassed to admit I sometimes watched in the late 1970s). Sometime in 1993 I was rewarded with tickets to go see "The Real Live Brady Bunch" at, I think, Center Stage, and I bought this T-shirt there. ("The Real Live Brady Bunch" didn't actually involve anyone who had been in the original "Brady Bunch" TV show 25 years earlier, as its name kind of implies; instead, it was a weird live performance of an episode of "The Brady Bunch" like it were a Chekhov play or something. The one I saw – maybe the only one they ever did in Atlanta – was "Oh, My Nose!" (I think that's what it's called), in which Marcia gets hit in the face with a football and her nose swells up. It was fun, going to "The Real Live Brady Bunch," I mean, but I'm glad the tickets were free.)
Also, for whatever it's worth, in the picture with the Cindy Brady T-shirt I'm wearing my Cookie Monster watch, which I had bought a couple of years earlier at the Sesame Street store at Gwinnett Place Mall, and which I still have (though it no longer works, unfortunately). In the other picture, I believe I'm wearing a Donald Duck watch. I used to collect character watches, and I still have a few (though none of them works).
I don't have either of those T-shirts anymore, though. I wish I did.
Today Elyse and I went to the Panola Mountain State Park Archery Range to do some shooting (but only at the "static" targets--the targets that look like targets--and not at the 3D targets, which are shaped like animals; that seems creepy and wrong to us, shooting arrows at animals, even pretend ones).
Here are a couple of pictures Elyse took of me there.
Today I went on a bit of drive, which lasted more than eight hours yet took me less than 100 miles from home. (I had to drive back, of course, but the total round-trip mileage was under 200.)
Here are some of the pictures I took, including several from where I had lunch in Forsyth (the city, not the county), and Musella, where I didn't even get out of the car (though I did roll down the window to take the pictures; and no, I didn't buy anything at Dickies).
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| This is where I had lunch, Georgia Bob's Barbecue Company in Forsyth |
I went on a Tame Adventure this afternoon after I met my friend Pearl for lunch at Lenox (also kind of a Tame Adventure), to the Grist Mill at Stone Mountain Park.
My brother was a monkey.
Not really, of course. But many years ago – many years ago, like forty-five or so – he liked to climb things, like this chair in my grandmother's house:
and this tree in my grandmother's backyard:
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| Also shown in this picture are my cousins Carrie and Heather |
.Come to think of it, maybe he was only a monkey at my grandmother's house!
In any case, what I prize about old photographs like these is not just that they remind us what we used to be like – including the fact that my brother was a monkey, which I had completely forgotten – but also that they remind us what the places we used to spend our time were like. I especially love pictures taken at my grandmother's house; I always see things in them I hadn't thought about in years – like the painting of the man praying over his bread on the wall of that eating area just behind Jeff in the second door-frame-climbing picture; and the flowerdy wallpaper on that same wall; and the flowerdy curtains and flowerdy seat-cushion in that same room, which you can't see in the bottom picture of Jeff clinging to the top of the door frame, but which you can see through the open door on the right side of the frame in the first picture above, the chair-climbing picture, and which you can see (the curtains, at least) have been changed by the time the third picture above, the one where Jeff is preparing to climb the door frame, was made, two or three years later; and the black bell on the wall just beside the door frame Jeff is climbing; and the black telephone mounted to the wall on the other side of the door frame; and the lighting fixtures; the plastic plants; the furniture…. It's all precious to see now, and it all fills me with that combination of happiness and melancholy that is nostalgia.
I've written this before, but though there are many wonderful things about my life now, sometimes I really miss the life I had forty-five years ago. And not just because my brother was a monkey.
And also not because, apparently, Tab was readily available back then.
At this time of year
Pollen collects in our lakes
– and on our cars, and
on our sidewalks, and even
on us if we remain still!
