The Photograph As Time Machine

The clarifier: I love my family to death and thank God for them daily. I also enjoy my extended family, some more than others, but I think that's fairly unavoidable.

I was at the house a couple of nights ago looking through old photographs with my mom, and it was uncanny: I felt nostalgia. I usually don't feel this concerning things that are actually sentimental. I feel nostalgia when I watch old cartoons, read an old book, but never over things that are inherently sentimental. But there I was.

I could see my mom as a girl no older than seven (looking exactly like my sister at that age), a teenager, a young woman. I could see my grandpa as a young man, before his accident that left him a quadriplegic, a young father, the cripple. Time stretched back into 40s, 50s, now my grandpa is an infant, now he's no more and I'm staring at great grandparents. People I've never met. Great great grandparents, aunts and uncles that have all left this world before I arrived.

Staring at these pictures, I felt disembodied, as though I flowed forward through time, and ebbed backwards through it. People I'd never seen, but now wished I did. My dad as a baby, his bald watermelon head, his parents as teenagers, grandpa with his first car at sixteen, back when the people knew that good habits started with responsibility. I almost felt as though I could reach out and join my grandpa hitchhiking on those Arizona roads, ride with my mom from Iowa, or sleep in the crib next to my infant dad.

I left my parent's house thinking about the photographs, thinking about people I haven't met but am deeply connected to.

These photographs solidified a decision: I want to write a book that will never get published. The only person to see it will be my kids, and their kids, and so on. The book will be entitled "The Last Thing I Ever Remember," it'll be a book simply of my memories and nothing more. Anything and everything I can remember recorded for my kids. They will record what they remember, and so on.

Imagine: your grandfather hands you a book and says, "my grandfather started writing in this book, and we want you to keep on writing."