FAMILY CHRISTMASES: ONCE UPON A TIME

PHOTOGRAPHS, HISTORY AND DIGITAL KINDNESS

My father's Red Room with heaps of history.

I told my father I would copy and digitally restore hundreds of color slides of the family, most of them from the 1950s and early 1960s. I surprised myself. It is not the sort of thing I volunteer to do very often.

I am not an unkind person and I do not lack compassion. But I always have been suspicious of acts of kindness and avoid them whenever I can. I do not volunteer or donate. I do not collect or distribute. I do not spend time with troubled youth or deliver hot meals to the elderly. I do not give money to ragged people who haunt street corners and live under bridges. I don’t hold anything against people who do those things, but I don’t do them.

However, I said I would do this. I justified it by telling myself it was an act of digital kindness. What harm could that do? A digital favor for a stubbornly un-digital old man.

Besides, photography is something my father and I share, but not in the way father's and sons usually share things. He didn't teach me how to take photographs - he wouldn't let me touch his camera. But he made me want to take photographs - because he wouldn't let me touch his camera. 

My first love was my father's camera. When I was a boy, it was the sexiest thing I knew of before I knew about sex. Looking at it made me want to touch it. Sneaking a hand into the deep right-hand bottom desk drawer where it was stored and touching it with the tips of my fingers made me feel like I wanted to do things I had no words to describe.

It was a Mercury II Univex 35mm rangefinder that shot half-size negatives and slides. It produced more than 60 tiny

images on a normal 36-exposure roll of film. With its aluminum body wrapped in black leather, it looked solid, efficient, German, but my father would not own a German camera. His wartime experience with precision German engineering, especially artillery, on an Italian beach south of Salerno in 1943 left no room in his life for anything German (when I bought a green Volkswagen - my first brand new car - in the late 1960s he would not ride in it). His Mercury II Univex was made in the no-nonsense postwar U.S.A. He loved that camera; I desired it. And the equipment that went with it: the tripod, the floodlights, the exposure meter. But they all were out of reach.

My father documented family trips, holidays (especially Christmases), birthdays, a visit to the grave of Stonewall Jackson, a trip into a coal mine where my mother was not allowed to go along because miners thought women were bad luck, a climb up Jockey’s Ridge (the largest natural sand pile on the east coast), mountaintops, lighthouses, beaches, my mother looking sexy in her black one-piece bathing suit, my baby sister naked and posed on a rug, my brother and sister splashing in the surf, me wearing an unfortunate pair of white pants called “clamdiggers” (Capri pants for boys; I remember they had a piece of white cotton rope for a belt) with which I wore white socks rolled down almost to my shoes; I was standing with my mother and sister in front of a large outdoor painting of Jesus somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina or Tennessee (I don’t have a clue where we were or why we were there; we were plain old Presbyterians and did not indulge in religious frou-frou of any sort; our church didn't even have stained glass windows). He took snapshots of all kinds of things all over the place and produced hundreds of Kodak color slides, which is what proud young men did to their wives and children in the 1950s.

Color slides required a hand-held viewer or a projector and a screen. They were a hassle to deal with and almost always ended up stored somewhere out of the way. Ours ended up in the hall closet with the sheets and towels. After many years, both our family and our slides began to degenerate, color faded and the smiles disappeared from some of the faces. A few faces were lost completely.

My father found that unacceptable. Those color slides were the holy relics of his faith in the past. He held onto that faith because people smiled back then and whatever happened since then didn’t turn out so well. He could not allow those old smiles to disappear. It would be a sacrilege.

He was not a historian. He hoarded the past, stored it in boxes and files stacked high in my old bedroom and in the

The Red Room leaks to the hall.

hallway just outside the door. He called it the red room and spent hours and hours there searching and labeling, ordering and reordering the world to his satisfaction. He was a missionary of his version of the past, preaching it to anyone who would listen. Sometimes he was entertaining, other times he didn't know when to shut up. 

Old color slides and old men both become problems, but the color slides are easier to fix. 

So I told my father I would be glad to run the slides through my scanner/copier and do what I could to restore the digital images. I would burn them onto CDs and send them to him. He agreed and sent me four boxes full of slides.

My wife keeps me supplied with electronic ways to amuse myself. I have computers, printers, various music devices, speakers, a turntable for digitizing our record collection, software, hardware, cameras, terabytes of storage. It’s sexy stuff and it makes my fingers tingle. She also bought me a very nice scanner/copier. It is the machine that lured me into kindness.

I thought it would be fun ( the truth is I am as suspicious of “fun” as I am of “kindness”). For a while it was. Those happy people on the beach, in the mountains, around the Christmas tree. Then it wasn’t. The faces began to lose their cheer as the 1950s passed into the 1960s. I began to see the misery and hardship that was coming sooner than anyone suspected. I could see it beginning at the corners of people's mouths, in their postures and the way their glances avoided the lense as time passed, the visible way lightheartedness became heavier with time. I know he didn't see it that way.

I finished the job and sent him the digital images. All of them. And I always thought I would return the slides to him but I never did. When I returned from his funeral I saw the boxes of slide-filled carousels on the shelf in my office closet. Inside each box are his tidy notes about which slides are most important to him, which ones to fix first. I will leave them there - at least for now - and eventually I'm sure I will look at them again and maybe I will add a note about which slides are most important to me for one of my own children to find. But I will never go through the boxes of slides searching for images of him. There are very few. He rarely let other people touch his camera.

As he grew old he would not allow anyone to touch the way he needed to see the world either. He preferred his past unsullied by subsequent reality. I live in an ever-sullied world. It is a difference we never resolved. But versions of history vary. He got what he needed from those old slides; I suppose I get what I need too.

 

My father photographs grandchildren on my sister's front lawn.

WHEN THE ROLL IS CALLED UP YONDER, LEAVE ME OUT

My Mom.

I couldn't help but think about my mother as my father's funeral neared its end. We were in what I always think of as the Heavenly Hoo-Hah part of the service, when the preacher envisions the deceased getting back together with those who have died before them - and with their blue-eyed Jesus - and everybody dancing around, shouting hallelujah, praising God and grinning those irritatingly smug, giddy, Born-Again Christian grins.

Of course, we were always Presbyterians and didn't hold much truck with either giddy or born again, but the preacher was a borrowed, overwrought Methodist and he was going on about imagining the gloriously happy reunion between my recently dead father and my dead-since-2006 mother. I could only imagine my mother shouting, "Oh, no! Not him! Not yet! I need more time!" and running the other way as fast as she could.

I chuckled.

My parents were married for 63 years. There were some years of happiness and many years of fearful co-dependency (often confused with loving care in her final few years). And there was almost never any time alone.

My mother shared a  bed with three of her sisters until the day she married; my father's bed was in a bedroom with his parents' and his brother's beds until that day, too. For nearly all of the next 63 years my parents slept together, 47 of those years in a small house - a kitchen, living room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, all gathered tightly around a short hallway - where life was crowded with children, grandchildren, relatives, damaged children, damaged children of relatives, homework, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, junkies, and where a few minutes alone in the bathroom were all the privacy anyone ever knew.

And it was noisy in that house, like a whirling kitchen blender full of marbles.

My mother realized too late that she probably would live out her life never having any quiet time alone. It was something she said she needed, something she told me over and over that she wanted, but something she said my father never would allow her to have. He was a very controlling man and she let him do it. I suggested that she was a grown woman who did not have to ask her husband's/my father's permission to find a place of her own. I even said I would help her find such a place, but she said, "He won't let me," and that was that. She asked for help but was afraid to be helped. That was the saddest part.

Alcohol helped her for a while and finally a debilitating illness gave her some relief. But she spent many years as an angry woman in a crowded, noisy life in a house she said she never liked. My last words to her when she died in April 2006 were, "You don't have to be angry any more." And she was able to be alone. And quiet. For a while. Death is not necessarily a bad thing.

Then after eight years my father died. And the preacher stood by his grave (next to her grave), prattling on about salvation, knowing the Lord, etc., blah-blah-blah, and imagined that wonderful heavenly reunion between them, which he seemed to believe could be taking place at that very moment. I could only imagine that my mother wouldn't find it so wonderful, that her idea of heaven just might be a place without my father in it. At least not for a while yet. And I could imagine her watching him stride happily toward her and - giddy, goofy-grinned Christian graveside visions notwithstanding - turning to flee, praying as she ran for a little more quiet time alone. Perhaps my father would call out to her as she ran but she would not stop. Not this time.

And if I believed in such things, I would hope her prayers were answered. And I would smile.

My Mom. With heavenly attitude.

 

UN-TIED: MY FATHER IN HIS COFFIN (2)

I looked down at my father.

Dead people shrink. I know that. But my father had lost so much weight near the end of his life that the coffin he picked seemed far too large, as if he could have used a size or two smaller. He was not wearing his glasses, but I don't think he had worn them much in the last months of his life. He never wore them during my last visit a few weeks before he died. He was tilted at a slight - uncomfortable looking - angle to the right. His hands did not look comfortably crossed on his stomach. They looked stacked and his fingers were straight and stiff. It was not the undertaker's finest work.

He was dressed in his blue suit - the one he described years ago to my wife as his "funeral suit" - and a light blue shirt open at the neck. No tie? My father always wore a tie with his suit. It was like a uniform - and he liked uniforms. Without a tie he looked not only uncomfortable, stiff and dead, he looked unnatural. I didn't like it.

Whose idea was that? I was ready to go find a tie and fit it around his neck the way he did for me when I was a boy and he was teaching me to tie a full Windsor knot. Men in my family thought a tie wasn't worth wearing unless it was tied in a full Windsor knot. No half-Windsors allowed. No clip-ons. A dress-up occasion wasn't a dress-up occasion without a well-knotted tie. And death always was a dress-up occasion. At least it always had been before.

I told my wife it wasn't right. My sister and one of my father's oldest friends were chatting a few feet away. I had to ask.

"Why doesn't he have on a tie?"

"Because he wanted it that way." My sister smiled.

"But why? It's not like him."

"I know," my sister said. She shrugged. "But he said no tie." She said he was very clear about the way he wanted things done at his funeral.

Dad's old friend Libby said my father quit wearing ties a while back. "When he started losing weight he didn't think a tie fit very well. His shirt collar was too loose on his neck. He didn't like the way it looked." Libby said he didn't even wear a tie to his older sister's memorial service a while back. "He liked to look good and he thought he looked better without a tie," she said. "And he refused to buy a new shirt." Of course he did.

Vanity compounded by frugality. That was my father. He would have angrily denied the first but fully embraced the last (the truth is there was more than a little bit of vanity in his frugality as well). He always said he was the best man at every wedding he ever attended. Now he wanted to be the best looking dead man he could be and that meant no tie. Not this time. And no new shirt to be buried in. Such a purchase would be painful to his Great Depression-honed sensibility (those of us who didn't live through the Depression and WWII never quite measured up in his estimation).


He planned it but it still didn't look right to me especially with the flag draped on the coffin. No tie. No flowers. Just the flag. He planned that too because above and beyond all other things in his life, my father was a veteran, sometimes too much a veteran and not enough other things, but that's who he was. And it's what he wanted.

In fact, my father planned his entire funeral in elaborate detail and paid in advance. The coffin, the vault, the clothes, the flag, the music (which had to be changed a bit because the singer couldn't hit the required high notes); he even went to see the minister about the eulogy. The whole thing went off almost without a hitch. There was gunfire and someone played "Taps." It would have been perfect if the gray-haired veteran helping fold the flag hadn't tripped over the burial machinery and nearly knocked over a weathered

old tombstone before he regained his balance, paused, then went on folding. He was embarrassed but unhurt - and the flag never touched the ground, that's important. I could imagine my father grimacing, but that stumble was the one flaw, the one little thing my father couldn't possibly have planned for, the thing that made everything else perfect. The flag was folded, salutes exchanged. My father loved flags and salutes. The flag was handed to my nephew just like my father wanted it. He loved my nephew (who I found out later was wearing my father's missing tie that day). All went as planned.

And without a rehearsal. He had wanted one of those too, just to make sure things were right. He liked to make sure. Practice. Practice. Practice. My sister-in-law said they talked him out of it, but my niece said she could imagine him saying, "I'll lie right here on the sofa and pretend I'm dead." And keep track of the way things were going. She could imagine it because that is precisely who he was. He was a man who wanted to attend his own funeral to make sure it was just the way he envisioned it, just the sort of man who would go to his grave tie-less and confident he was the best man there and let the rest of us go about our business. Even dead and tie-less he was still in charge. 

My father had a long life full of plans, almost always unrehearsed, and flawed by trips, stumbles and falls no matter how hard he practiced. It was the only life he had and he lived it the best he could, all the way to the end. It is the most anybody can do.

If you visit his grave and find a tie on his headstone (with a full-Windsor knot), you will know that I have been there. And it will be one of mine. I hate ties and see no need to wear one ever again. I never thought he would see it my way.
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If you go to my old blog The UnTexan you will find the pieces I wrote around the time of my mother's death in 2006. You can click on the archive for April 2006 or click on the category Mom, Death and Family. There's lots of other stuff on there too. Years of stuff. In fact, click on anything and everything. Enjoy yourself.
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