Travel, Half a Century Ago

I bet if you go to Hawaii now and go to a luau for tourists, there will be islanders and maybe a pit. But what I love about this old slide is the tourists with their outfits and their giant flash cameras with exploding bulbs. Well, maybe for tomorrow's entry I'll get back to my own 21st Century life, but I'm currently on a staycation. More on that later.

Nostalgia

I'm not doing too well with the Holidailies thing. Today I was going to talk in depth about holiday cards, gifts or decorations. But I keep getting distracted. Yesterday I was going to do something more than the 'oops I didn't really post yesterday.' But I didn't. I had to catch up on some financial stuff, I read the newspapers and we drove through blowing snow (really, but it wasn't quite freezing so that was good) to a dinner party and it ran sort of late. I've been sending out holiday cards to a few people and to people who send me one.Today, I sort of worked on the puzzles a long time and then we took a walk on the chilly, sunny day and had an al fresco lunch. Then we had to go to the bookstore and buy presents for ourselves. When I got home I was going to write some more, but I got a few holiday cards in the mail plus I got the images from some slides I had scanned and started downloading them.

Which leads me to the picture above and the title of this post. My aunt, my dad's youngest sister, is 86 years old She's downsizing as fast as she can. She had some 35mm slides and I told her I would take them and go through them and maybe get some scanned. I spent a long time with the loupe and viewer and took some to a camera store for high-resolution scanning last week. The one above was taken in Hawaii in the fifties. She was in the Navy and stationed there. When I went through the slides I had this rush of nostalgia for when I was a little kid and my aunt (who is barely 17 years older than I am) was my idol because she traveled around in the Navy. Anyway, nostalgia is a great time waster, I find. And that's one of many reasons I'm behind on everything else. But isn't that a fun picture?

Throw Back Thursday...The Christmas Spirit

My mom loved Christmas and if you had known her, you would have to smile when she came to your house with holiday decorations hanging from her ears and this sweatshirt on and, as I remember, socks with Santas on them as well. This is in our old house in Austin in 2000. It is the last Christmas that my mom really felt good, I think. By Christmas 2001 she would be on her way to death by Multiple Myeloma but we wouldn't know it or have a name to put with her problems. We would even have an extremely frustrating hospital visit right before Christmas in 2001. But she was pretty chipper in 2000.

She put up the tree when we were kids and put surprise wrapped packages under it when I'm pretty sure money was very tight. Santa came and he didn't disappoint.

She made turkeys and homemade dressing and gravy and rolls and might invite scads of people to partake. She made pies.

I remember one Christmas when I was still living in Dallas. My sister was visiting Mom with her kids, I think. My cousin and his wife and their three kids were there. Mom decided everyone needed a stocking. She got out the sewing machine and started whipping up these personalized stockings. Her sewing machine needle broke and I had to go to a mall (I swear it was Christmas Eve) and go to Sears or some place like that and get one. I believe my mom decided kids needed bikes and trikes and wagons, too,. It seemed my mom was whipping up holiday spirit out of thin air, that we all had some good reason not to feel that great that particular holiday and I can't put my finger on why. But we had a great time as I remember. And it was all her.

I've said it many times but I'll say it again: the Christmas spirit left me when this woman left us. And it will never really return. Not in that way. Not even if I get out a jigsaw puzzle or a board game and sit down to that recreation with a cup of black coffee and some leftover pie. That would remind me of Mom but I don't think it would give me the same feeling of holiday cheer.

Datebook

Going through my dad's things yielded some surprises, some tears, some real finds. OK it was mostly trash and moderate treasure headed to the thrift store without regret. A few things were saved for me or my sister, a few other things judiciously given away. One thing I immediately moved to toss and then didn't was an Austin 2004 date book. Apparently someone gave it to him, maybe for Christmas. If so, he didn't write who gave it to him inside. Maybe he'd bought it for himself. After I retired, I taught him to go to Barnes and Noble, prowl around, read their books in the coffee shop. Sometimes he would buy things there.

Anyway he used it throughout the year to jot down his appointments and in a few cases who he visited with and what he had to eat. Pretty mundane stuff. I read through it all and moved to throw it away and then didn't. I trotted it out again and read all the mundane entries. The name of the urologist he didn't like and later fired. A bunch of appointments to see about a large goiter we'd just discovered. Appointments with a GP I later fired. A note on one day that he spent $14.35 on food. Indications that he planned to attend water aerobics, later abbreviated to H20 Arb or W-A. On January 17, 2004 he wrote 'Rain 5 inches over 3 or 4 days.' Emptied his rain gauge, I guess. This was back when he drove himself lots of places. Not everywhere. The surgeon considering his goiter was in St. David's big medical complex and he wanted me to take him there. He noted cards he mailed to his grandchildren and calls he made to his sisters. The gate code for an apartment where he picked up a woman and took her to church activities. Dates were noted for parties for a friend's 90th birthday and a couple's 50th wedding anniversary.

On June 2, he noted 'Linda and FFP to France.' On July 20 he wrote 'Fly out 12:30P to Frankford [sic].' He meant Frankfurt. Germany. He was eighty-seven years old and headed on an almost thirty day trip to Germany, England and Iceland with a friend. On August 17 he wrote: 'Return from London.' On the 18th: 'From Chicago at 1:30AM No luggage.'

The last six years weren't kind to my dad and he had some difficulties even back when keeping this datebook, but somehow these few scrawls show me just how in control of his life he was then and how much he was enjoying it in spite of everything.

I still haven't managed to throw it away.

Nostalgia for a Camera

Yesterday I was writing about how we sometimes want everything new and refreshed if not replaced. But we have a strong nostalgia for the past way of doing things. People collect tintypes and old photos, even if they are of people or places they never knew. People collect LPs, swearing they sound different (or that changing the record is part of the charm or that the cover art and liner notes in that large size are incredible).

It's been all over the news that Polaroid is going to discontinue its instant film. There was a piece in The Times, I think, and one on CBS Sunday Morning today.

I don't even use film these days and I gave away, finally, my Polaroid Automatic 101 camera that I acquired in 1964 or so during the great downsizing of 2008. I used Freecycle to find a camera collector who took some old digital cameras and wrote me about working on them and then I offered that camera to him. He claimed in an e-mail (I never met him) that he fixed a pinhole in the bellows and worked on it.

But Polaroid film and the ownership of that camera (see above picture for one virtually identical being peddled by an ebay trader) had a great influence on my photography vision as well as my relationship to and desire for gadgetry.

Examples of the photography with that camera are in lots of albums I still have and I have scanned quite a few in the service of online journals and blogs like this. as well as to do various family projects. Today, though, I offer the example below. It is a picture of my brother-in-law in 1967. He is smoking a cigarette in my parents' home. He did not yet have children. He was a lieutenant in the Air Force, if I'm not mistaken. I do think there is a difference in the colors, the skin tones especially, in these old prints developed instantly with a package of emulsions given sixty seconds to do their work after being triggered by compression between stainless steel rollers.


That camera! It was top of the line (trimmed with leather and stainless steel). I had two lens adapters with gadgets to put over the viewfinder to make close-ups or portraits. I mostly took portraits of people. Especially after my brother-in-law and sister adopted a daughter in 1968 and my sister had her second daughter in 1970. I wanted the camera for months, maybe a year. I got it while I was still in high school, maybe Christmas 1964. My mother surprised me with it. I think it blew the Christmas budget. (I think it cost about $120 which was real money then.) I had been cadging Green Stamps (remember those) to try to get one. I had, I think, thirteen books of Green Stamps. I think it took forty or fifty to get one. That Christmas my mother convinced me I'd never get enough of these trading stamps. You got them from retailers, mostly the grocery store, and pasted them in books and there was a catalog of gifts you could get. Anyway, she convinced me it was futile and used the stamps to buy other Christmas presents. And she secretly found the money somewhere to give me the camera. I took so many pictures, finding the money somehow for film and those crazy exploding flash bulbs. (The gadgets I got had an extra plastic diffuser for the flash to soften the explosion for close-ups and portraits.)

I used that camera for a good decade, I think. And I knew all the ins and out. I knew to keep the stainless steel rollers clean and I could load film and pop in flash bulbs with my eyes closed. I pulled the film out with a firm, confident motion. I could count to a minute while taking another picture. I deftly folded the emulsion waste and discarded it. (Much later I would use this waste with an artist friend's help to make artsy transfer prints by using the film to take pictures of slides with a gadget that used a similar film.)

I knew that camera and its limitations and mine. I have had six digital cameras (maybe five, but, I think, six). Sure I know a bit about them and have learned to use some editing capabilities on the computer for the resultant pile of pixels. But I never learned all the ins and outs of those cameras. I never coveted owning them like I did that Polaroid 101. I'm not sure what that means, but I think it means that flat packs of magic film and exploding flashbulbs are things I experienced that the young folks can't begin to understand. I think they probably blow through gadgets before they really learn how to use them. Just as I do today. Time is compressed. But nothing can take that memory away and, now that I've floated my brother-in-law's image on the Internet (probably not for the first time) the Polaroid colors and his dream-like smoker's state take on a new life albeit in pixel-land.

[Ed. Note: Tomorrow is the penultimate day of Holidailies and the writing prompt today is "Your favorite Holidailies post(s) this year (yours or someone else's)." Which is a great prompt as is tomorrow's: "The One Thing I Want for Holidailies 2009" and the last day's, appropriately, "Epiphany." I hope that I can write about some of this in the coming days. I need to do some reading before declaring favorite(s) and I need to work on my idea for epipany to make it sound less, um, bitter. As to what I want for Holidailies 2009, well one always fears making a 'feature creature' out of a bit of programming that is pretty great the way it is.]

Overheated Nostalgia

The picture is from last June which, it seems to me, was not as hot. In any case, it was provided by a junk shop on South Lamar.

I have spent the last twenty-four hours or so at the old house, Shoal Creek manor, the burbs. It reminds me of my younger days of drifting around, making lots of use of other people's couches and spare rooms and hospitality; of sometimes being left alone in a space not exactly mine (maybe the parents' house, an aunt's, my sister's, maybe a friend's place) and being welcomed to use, consume, read anything I liked. Last night Forrest and I sorted through some food that was left here and found an unopened package of mild cheddar and some Saltines. I made coffee with the one cup French press, boiling water in the tea kettle I retrieved from the condo. When I flipped on the flame, I thought, "pretty soon you won't be cooking with gas." We found a couple of frozen entrées in the old refrigerator's freezer and had them for dinner. I found a bit of small batch bourbon in the bottom of a bottle to go with mine.

Today I'm goofing off around two areas of the house while the floor guy works diligently on the old 1951 floors. I should be doing something useful. I took a box labeled 'sort!' into the big room at the back of the house. I watched some Wimbledon, snacked on some Boursin I found in the frig unopened (barely beyond its 'best by' date) and got interested in an article in an old New Yorker that was in that box. Also in the box was an abacus I bought in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1966 along with the crudely translated guide to using it. (The latter still had its price tag: twenty-five cents. "You can be sure...........if you've got ABACUS You don't need a paper or pencil. It releives you of intricacy of tedious ciphering.) The summer of 1966 my sister and I took a languid trip west to Sacramento where she left me with some people who were parents of a friend of hers and took my VW Beetle off to visit with her husband at his temporary duty station at some Air Force Base. I welcomed the solitude, really. The couple seemed lonely as their daughter was grown. They went to work each day, but left lots of snacks and they treated us to that trip to San Francisco, I think. I would go out in the backyard and 'work on my tan' for a while, reading. Then I'd sit in the AC and watch TV and eat snacks. (Those little Goldfish crackers were a favorite that summer.) I taught myself to add long columns of numbers on the abacus. I never bothered to master multiplication but I could fly through adding up a big sum. I walked around the neighborhood and took what I thought were artsy pictures of houses and cars. I wrote long letters to my friends and, if I remember correctly, got some answers while I stayed there.

That staying around my own house of thirty years now gives me this feeling of scrounging, of life put on hold but full of possibility, is, I think, amusing.

I worked out today in the gym at my club. Back to the house to check on things, I pondered which place to take a shower in. I feel dislocated, distant and yet wonderfully able to concentrate on my old abacus and remember that old self, seeking adventures in the junk of a Chinese souvenir shop. It was impossibly exciting in its own way.

The guy doing the floors has been marveling at the accumulated gunk that has built up in fifty-seven years (we don't think they've EVER been refinished). There is some of that gunk in my brain, too, and I keep hoping that cycling through the junk again and again will finally sand it down and I'll find the person I'm supposed to be in my seventh decade on earth. It won't be a moment too soon to figure this out.

There's Something in a Sunday

I'm not sure I feel so all alone (a reference to a Kris Kristofferson song) since FFP and I have been interacting most of the morning and early afternoon. I do feel a little overwhelmed and sad, though. I think that's probably typical for someone a couple of weeks away from acquiring a new place to live that will then have to be decorated, redone, settled into, furnished and adjusted to. All the while, maintaining the old abode and getting it fixed up and things removed from it and somehow getting it sold. Adding to my list of things to fret about is a visit from a bunch of relatives. They are staying with Dad. They won't be here too many days and the hope is that they won't drive him crazy!

When we ask the people at the condo office to let us do something or get information, their standard response is "We know you are excited about moving in, but..." followed by some explanation about why we aren't seeing things clearly. Ha. Excited. No. Scared, weary, afraid I'm forgetting something, certain they are forgetting something. Yes.

So, yeah, we dug into some of our tasks today. We attacked the cabinets in our media room. What a graveyard of anachronistic media. Laser disks, VHS tapes, cassette audio tapes, CDs, LPs, DVDs. If we sell the house to the buyer of choice all the equipment will stay. (All these media have players in that cabinet!) Therefore we decided to leave the laser disks behind. Cassettes are going to thrift store or trash. A few VHS ones survived. I packed four boxes of CDs. Yikes. Perhaps more winnowing will occur at the other end? Yeah, right. We haven't addressed LPs or DVDs yet.

Lots of stooping and lifting. FFP made migas while I started on the job and then he did lots of getting up and down off the floor to get the lower shelves. Finally we lost the will to continue on this particular task and FFP went to get the cars washed. My car would never get washed if he didn't take it.

While I was eating my migas, I sat at the table in the big room (the media room) because our breakfast table only accommodates one person with newspapers spread out all over the place. (FFP said that soon we will have a table where we can both sit. Which is true because our table for the condo is bigger than the breakfast table in question. However, in this house we had two other tables steps away from this one in other rooms. One is gone now, but still. I think he has a point, though, but I'm sure we will be bumping into each other in the condo in more ways than this.) I looked out into the backyard I will soon abandon and watched a blue jay bedevil a junk iron sculpture of a bird. It's beautiful. But there is always something dying or something growing where it isn't wanted as in the vine shown above.

There is a funny feeling that you spent money on components and media and, really, when did you think you were going to sit down and listen or watch all this stuff? I turned the CD player on and we listened to a few CDs. I flipped on the cable first and discovered that all the premium channels were blocked. We haven't watched TV in that room for a while. I'd returned cable boxes from two other rooms and I figured they had messed something up. I called and, amazingly, I got a technician with a big brain. He found something in their "quirky" (his word) billing system that caused it. He checked a box and voilà...we were getting the service we were paying for in that room. I mean we probably won't watch in there again for a while (ever?) but I hate it when things are like that. I still haven't gotten anyone with the company that is providing TV and such for our new condo to discuss it with me. And we are buying new (flat screen) TVs. So it may be months before I have a DVR and stuff in the condo. Not watching TV for a while would probably be a good idea! We could listen to CDs! Watch DVDs! (Yeah, I have three Netflix titles sitting around in the bedroom.)

Meanwhile, the computer transition isn't going too swimmingly. I called the Apple Store on Tuesday and Thursday. Both times the part was going to be in 'the next day.' Thursday the genius said "and then we will fix it and call you when it's ready." Don't call us, we'll call you. This made my guru upset (he's the real genius, I think). He called and they said "the part is being shipped and it will be in tomorrow." Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I'm spending too much time trying to tweak computer environments. I seem to be a master at crashing machines. I crashed the Windows XP in the VMware as well as getting the iMac in a state where it wouldn't restart without a boot to the head. It all came back, but I've got to admit: I'm getting a little gun shy! Not that I'm not backing up everything and not that it isn't fun to break things, but sometimes you just want your computer to work!

But for the moment, I'm going to go through some more stuff. Maybe shred some old receipts. Maybe try to find some more stuff to get rid of. Maybe catalog a few things.

Evidence

I am transferring all my archives from my old machine to my new environment. For some reason I feel it is necessary to photograph the messy shelves arond my house. This picture was taken in 2001. A lot of stuff in this photograph is gone. Various books. The toy pinball machine. The shelves themselves are virtually empty and I have on my 'to do' list to take them apart so that they will be out of the way when we refinish the floors. We are putting that off until we are closer to being out of the house so we don't have a chance to mess them up again.

Today I got depressed going through ancient financial stuff. Even investments that worked out well weighed on me somehow in the sorting. Never mind the fiascos. I actually found the unused payment coupons from the year we moved from a house down the street to this house. They were IBM punch cards and the payments were less than ninety dollars a month. FFP thought that was very amusing. Life was simpler once, that's for sure.

Study in Black and Gray

I took this shot in MOMA in New York when we were there. (Which seems like ages ago now.) I like the motion and the (lack of) color palate and the way the guard and the gal taking a picture bookend the picture and the way the wall color and painting (actually a manipulated photo) cooperate in making a new work of art with the people. (Ha. That's me pretending my photography is art!)

What is also amusing about this picture is that MOMA is mounting a new show this week ( “Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today”) with an emphasis on color. And in The New York Times a guard was featured wearing a vest designed for the show in an article about it. It could be the same guard!

I mentioned the weather in my last post so I have to confess that the weather for tennis was so glorious that it dismissed my thoughts of politics, downsizing and taxes. Mostly. And I did get my in-laws taxes finished. Otherwise I wasn't too productive.

I'm getting nostalgic for this house. And we are starting to face some logistic issues. A couch we bought for the condo is being delivered so we have to have it delivered here and moved to the condo later. But we can't put it where the couch we gave away was because we are going to refinish the floor in that room. And it's spring so we have to at least supervise a lot of yard work. Well, FFP does, bless him. Anyway, as we move and touch all this stuff, there are lots of memories and impressions of comfort that we feel we might be giving up. This confusion and these feeling are inevitable, I imagine.

As part of my sorting and sifting, I bring things into my (still FAIRLY neat!) office and let them sit there while I decide what to do with them. Currently I have some magazines from the '30's and '60's, two clay beer mugs from Munich and a set of cards with an accompanying book called "The Observation Deck" which is designed to inspire creativity. Ha. You mean like actually writing something besides a blog?

Dad, the Past and the Future

In 1952 someone snapped a picture of my dad and his mother and all his siblings. Dad is third from the left.

In 2008, yesterday, Dad had a day surgery but was put under general anesthetic. After which he informed the nurses he knew how to take care of himself at home, told them a few jokes and, once home, insisted on cooking his own lunch.

Yep he's a trooper, my dad. His own dad died in 1948 and his mother (center) would be dead in about a year. But fifty-two years later he is still going. (As are three of the sisters in this picture.)

You wonder when you see a picture like this if anyone in it could imagine the future. And you think, probably not. That's just how I feel, too. I can't imagine the future even as I try to plan for it.

Stuff of Another Era

I was combing through pictures and found this one from last year about this time at a flea market on Burnet Road. It caught my eye because of the typewriters and slide projectors. Hmmm...I think there are some of those somewhere in this house. Sigh. Right now I'm in an acquisitive mode. But the good news is that all of it is gifts for birthdays and Christmas. So it will be out of here soon. I did tell a few relatives some books that I'd like so there may be an influx of stuff for the holiday. Sigh.

Seeing typewriters is always a little nostalgic for me. I remember when owning a typewriter was a big deal and promised to make a writer out of me.

For the record, it has been easy to post a picture and a little text here every day. (My commitment to NaBloPoMo.) After all...I'm displacing from downsizing!

That Old Self

Going through my closets and sorting every single thing, trying to reduce, reduce, reduce has resulted in rather too much nostalgia. And I'm not even close to done. I've been reading things I wrote in the '70's and '80's and '90's. And postcards and letters from other people and ones I wrote myself and got back from the recipient. And pictures. This one I haven't actually physically touched in a while. I scanned it into the computer a long time ago. It was probably displayed on a journal but maybe not. Scanning and transcribing things into the computer is one way to let go of the physical thing. Not that I would give up this Polaroid of FFP and I on our 13th anniversary. If I could actually find the actual picture, I mean. I have no idea where it is at the moment. As we get older we have more and more past and less and less room to keep it all, I think.

The picture is a Polaroid taken by the owner of a restaurant in New Braunfels where we celebrated our anniversary. Ignoring the oversized glasses (what were we thinking?), notice the lack of gray hair.

Nostalgia can choke you with its dust and over important poignancy after a while. Just looking at one old hand-written journal or photo can be fun. Stacks of them? Overwhelming. Sad.