Snapshots in Time

    

Snapshots in Time

It is an interesting cultural statement that while modern cell phones provide on-the-go communications, the commercials for the latest models (which seem to come out every couple of months now) rarely, if ever, say anything about the phone’s communication ability.  But much is said about the device’s camera.  In my youth, and in much of my adult life too for that matter, phones and cameras were different things.

I am old enough to remember when our phone was fixed to the kitchen wall, and if you were using it, the phone’s cord kept you tethered to phone, ensuring that you didn’t roam more than six feet away or so.  By the time hit my teens and even started using the phone with any regularity, the phone cord was so twisted up from over-stretching that the user’s range was probably more like five feet.

We had an eclectic assortment of cameras in our house.  My sister Sharon had a camera where you had to change the flash bulb with every picture.  This was a torturous model because it was required that you pick up the ejected flash bulb which was still very hot, and kind of pass it back and forth between your hands until it cooled off.  I can’t recall why it wasn’t possible to just let the discharged bulb totally cool before you picked it up – it probably had something to do with worrying about burning down the house.

I went in search of non-buried treasure this week and found it in a cardboard box stacked on a basement shelf.  The box, slightly musty-smelling, holds remnants of my life.  Here, in black and white and “living” color, slightly-out-of-focus, curled from age, is a small collection of snapshots that I took with me when we cleaned out our parent’s house after they passed away 40 plus years ago.  Most of them were “my pictures” meaning that I was at least one of the ones pictured, but a few of them I obviously took because of I wanted someone else’s picture – like the one of my dad.

I think this is the best picture I have of him.  It was taken while we were on a camping trip to Boulder Lake.  He is still sporting his crew-cut haircut, which he grew out several years after this was taken.  He is smoking his pipe.  I can remember buying that pipe for him for Christmas, and it was long enough ago that I even bought him the cherry-flavored pipe tobacco to smoke even though I was probably only about 8 or 9 years old.  It’s probably better now that children can no longer buy tobacco, but there was also something to be said that there was an expectation and an assumption that a child buying pipe tobacco was likely buying a Christmas or birthday present for his father.  And he probably was.  But the thing I like most about the picture is that he looks happy.  Some years after this picture was taken my father feel deeper and deeper into alcohol abuse – there really weren’t many happy times that I remember from the last dozen years of his life.  But here, in this moment, his smile is genuine.

The one of me in football gear was taken when my dream of being the best halfback ever for the Green Bay Packers was still real.  I had a mind and a heart for the game.  I understood the planned and executed genius of the Lombardi sweep.  But by the time I reached high school it was more appropriate to time me in the 100-yard dash with a calendar than a stopwatch.  My hands were better than Boyd Dowler, but there was no speed in my feet.  That dream died as hard as the metal bench that I watched my high school games from.

The picture below of Julie Swim and I made me smile when I came across it again.  She was my best friend for five or six years.  Our back yards connected.  She could run, she could throw a football, and she was an excellent hider and seeker.  She was a year older than me.  She taught me, much to my surprise, that not everyone was Catholic.  My entire family was Catholic.  I went to St Jude Grade School, so all of my school friends were Catholic.  When I asked her one Sunday afternoon why I never saw her at church, she simply said, “We go to a different church.”  I remember a brief moment where I tried to

grasp that, and then we went to the park to play.  When difference makes no difference on how you value the person, that is proper ecumenism.  I’m pretty sure our friendship was ended by Julie’s mom shortly after this picture was taken.  She had seen us wrestling in the back yard and Julie explained that her mother didn’t think it was proper for girls and boys to wrestle.  I didn’t understand the issue at the time.  When I finally did figure it out my only regret was that Julie’s mom didn’t intervene until after she pinned me and made me plead “uncle” that day.

The picture of me sleeping says a lot.  First, it reminded me that I slept in a crib until I was four years old.  I didn’t fit too well anymore.  But I didn’t get a “grown-up” bed until my oldest brother Jim joined the Navy after he graduated from high school.  I’m also covered up with my blanket.  I never made fun of Linus from the

Snoopy comic because I can remember that I dragged that blanket around with me wherever I went in the house until I was five.  I still remember the fateful day when my mother called me to the washer and dryer.  She showed me how my blanket had pretty much fallen apart during the “spin cycle”.  Maybe that blanket was the first friend that I left behind.  Perhaps it cushioned the blow when Julie stopped being a tom boy and began being a young lady. 

I look at the picture and wonder what the four-year-old Dan was dreaming that day?  Whatever it was, I know that it fell far short of the many blessings that have come my way.  Truly, I have been blessed and have lived ‘undreamed-of’ dreams.

His Peace <><

Deacon Dan