Cold remembrances of someone else's past

Self-imposed house arrest, in limbo, waiting for Monday, oral defense day. I made it to the store today, yay me. I had to go; I was out of eggs. Can't live without eggs. It's cold. The temperature almost made it above freezing, but I'm not going to complain: Minneapolis barely made it to 8° before the mercury plunged back down to 5° above. 20° I can handle; 8° would drive me under the covers. After a long hot bath.

While I wait for the waiting to be over, I am building shelves. As if I didn't have enough shelves already, you would no doubt say, if you've ever been lucky enough to see my place: The walls are papered with homemade wooden book shelves, which sag under the weight of books, binders, and more books. Most of the shelves are full. But you can never have too many shelves. The simple wooden shelves I build now will receive my journals as I continue to fill the pages and discard them, one per month, year after year since 1995. The boring story of my life, literally. It takes up a lot of space. Physically and otherwise.

And while I wait for the loden green latex to dry, I scan old family photos. I have only myself to blame. My mother wanted me to look through a stack of musty photo albums one day, and I made the mistake of saying, Hey, we need to scan these! Thus, I volunteered for this self-torture. The albums sat around my worktable for a few months while I wrote the massive tome we call my dissertation. Last week I realized now would be a good time to start clearing up the clutter (considering my compulsively neat friend Sheryl is coming over to be my proctor for my oral defense). Hence, scanning.

It's a mindless, tedious task involving removing old black and white photographs from little paper corners that someone painstakingly positioned 60 to 80 years ago. The album pages are dirty, dusty black paper, and reek of ancient cigarette smoke. It's fairly gross work. While I place five or six images on the scanner bed, I can see if someone wrote something on the back. Sometimes there are useful comments: Ray, Ruth, and me. (Me is my mother.) There are many pictures of my mother and her brother as children, fewer of them as teenagers, and hardly any of them as adults. I'm guessing by then my mother was the one behind the camera. My uncle was behind a glass of wine.

Other annotations were less helpful: This is a picture of the loading dock. Where, Grandpa? When? My mother's father was a sailor and then a longshoreman, first in San Francisco and then in Portland. I didn't know him well, although I could have if I hadn't been so nervous around him. As a very young man, he sailed on the Moshulu, a merchant sailing ship that went from the States to Australia and the Philippines. Some of the photos are obviously taken from the rigging, looking down on decks awash with ocean. Yikes. Now the Moshulu is refitted with fake masts and sails, serving as a restaurant in Philadelphia. And Grandpa is long gone.

Looking at all these photos of people I barely knew or didn't know at all, most of them dead now, makes me feel a little sad. It's a year-end kind of sadness, the sadness you get when it's garden-to-bed time, when it's fleece hat, electric blanket, and rice-filled foot-warmer time. Every summer there is a moment when I stop what I'm doing and think about how I will be feeling in six months, when I'm bundled in cat hair-covered fleece. When the electric baseboard heater is clicking and clacking as it churns out warm (ish) air. When I don't go outside for three days in a row and only then to refill the bird feeder and break the ice on the bird bath. Every summer I drag my feet on the paths of Mt Tabor, hoping I can make summer last a little longer, trying to postpone the horrible moment when there are more leaves underfoot than overhead. Time passes so quickly. Even though this week seems endless, next week will speed by, and the week after that, until all that is left of me and everything and everyone I love is a bunch of old photos in a stinky photo album.