Last week on one of my afternoon walks I decided to walk down to Chapman Lake Park. This is a small neighborhood located off of Chapman Lake, one of the many lakes that surround the area where I live. As a kid Chapman Lake Park was located directly across the field from the house I grew up in(the same house where my parents still reside.) The field was a great spot to go fly kites in the fall, after the farmer had tilled the remaining corn stalks after harvest. It was also a cool place for my best friend and I to just explore and be somewhere we really weren't supposed to be.
That aforementioned best friend lived in Chapman Lake Park, in a small house located on a channel with his dad, stepmom, and stepbrother. We spent a lot of time in that house at 8, 9, 10-years old. We spent more time at my house, but his place was where we'd play Atari, play with Star Wars toys, and ride bikes around the neighborhood. It was an important place in the scheme of things.
I decided to take some photos of the old stomping grounds and I texted them to my friend. We've talked about going on a Saturday morning walk together down to Chapman Lake Park and reliving those memories. It hasn't happened yet, but I thought I'd send the photos of the old neighborhood anyways. There was the spot we used to dive into and hide from cars coming to and fro the neighborhood, the channel where his house resided, and the long drive down to the dead end at the end of the park we'd ride our bikes to. I couldn't figure out which house was his, as over the years the homes have changed so much. New siding, add-ons, and just my own memory have blurred the lines between what was, what is, and what never was.
Looking at the nondescript photos I sent my friend, I would imagine a stranger or someone just not familiar with the neighborhood or our childhood would see some pretty boring pictures. Overgrown bushes and weeds next to a road, a channel obscured by tree limbs, a street sign, and a road leading to more homes would seem to the uninitiated kind of boring.
To us?
These photos represented our childhood; from Halloween nights stalking front porches dressed as mini-ghouls in search of Reeses, Snickers, and Kit Kats to riding our bikes as fast as we could fearful that "Jake" would get us(the neighborhood Urban Legend the older kids made up to mess with us brats.) One summer afternoon we took out his parents pontoon for a high speed adventure out on the lake. In my mind I imagined us as Crockett and Tubbs chasing cocaine smugglers off the coast of Miami, the pontoon ripping through the current like a cigarette boat at breakneck speed. In reality we did some large circles at the boat's top speed of 18 miles an hour as onlookers avoided us like the plague. As we headed back into the channel to dock the boat before my pal's dad got home the pontoon puttered out. We were out of gas. As we coasted silently to his pier my friend's dad stood waiting, getting off work early just in time to catch Crockett and Tubbs, the smugglers getting away.
Alas, no photos of that day. If there were the average onlooker wouldn't think twice. Me? That whole day would come rushing back; from the pulverizing heat of July in Indiana to the glorious wind whipping my sweaty mop of hair as we ran that pontoon for all it had. Then, the cannon ball in the pit of my stomach as the boat died on our final few yards to home, and the horror of seeing an angry dad standing on the pier dropping expletives like a sailor. I don't think we got into a whole lot of trouble, as the only thing I can remember to this day is the joyride.
I remember as a kid I was obsessed with the 4 or 5 jam-packed photo albums my mom had put together. There was a floral one that had photos of my parents right after they got married in 1967, as well as quite a few of my older brother as a baby and toddler. I was fascinated with things like the trailer park they lived in for the first 7 to 8 years they were married. Big oak trees and sidewalks, and my dad's short cropped hair and his muscle cars parked in the street. The baby carriage my brother was pushed in, which looked like a baby doll carriage and hardly safe enough for a doll(let alone an actual living baby.) The photos of long dead relatives at the beach as my mom held my brother, looking barely old enough to drive let alone be a mom.
Then there was the mustard yellow photo album, which was where my photo story began. From a curly-haired toddler in a diaper and Snoopy shirt to Christmas mornings opening gifts as our miniature schnauzer Klaus sniffed approvingly. Birthday parties with neighbor kids long gone and the various shaped birthday cakes(my favorite was a Boba Fett cake.) My parents drinking Strohs in the backyard listening to the Blasters and Georgia Satellites, while grandparents sit around the kitchen table smoking More 100s and drinking whiskey on the rocks at Thanksgiving(I can still remember that tobacco smoke wafting in the air as I went out to grab a piece of pumpkin pie.)
Those photos were portals to those moments. Whenever I opened those photo albums I could go back to those times and relive them. Those Polaroids and Instamatic pics would light up those memory synapses, and along with the faint chemical smells that still permeated those photos I could enjoy Christmas morning, 1983 and 4th of July, 1988 all over again.
There was also a smaller set of photo albums.
The photos in these books were all black and white and sepia tone. A lot of them were tattered and torn, as if passed down over the years. They were of my mom's grandparents and parents, as well as my mom and her siblings when they were little. Most of them were taken in the late 40s and early 50s, and for the most part I didn't recognize most of the people in this pictures. I could pick out my mom and aunt and uncles, as despite being decades older I recognized them all. And of course my grandparents, although much younger and looking seemingly happier(it'd be almost two decades later in the late 60s before my mom's parents split up.)
I always had a kind of indifference when looking at those pictures. For the most part it felt like looking into someone else's life. It could have been any post-Depression era/post-WW II family in the Midwest trying to make ends meet. I never felt like I had any connection, despite it being a good chunk of where I came from. But when my mom would look at those photos with me, I could see the opposite in her. She knew all the names, places, cousins, and even dogs in the photos. I could see the glow in her face, as well as the tinge of sadness seeing people she'd loved that had been gone for decades. I imagine it was the same face I had when looking in the floral photo book and the mustard yellow photo book. Absolute connection and immersion to another time where you existed, only smaller and with less world weary anxiety lying on your shoulders.
Photos are the gateway to another time. They allow us to head back hours, days, weeks, and decades to a certain point in our life. To those that weren't there, photos are memories out of context; just random faces in random places doing random things. A photo is just one piece of a cosmic puzzle that's taken decades to put together. But to those that lived and existed in that puzzle it's a key that unlocks a world that was once real, and in turn another one of "us" that lived in that time and place. Maybe it's a way to better understand who we are now, or maybe it just makes us feel the emotions we were living in that snapshot of time. Good, bad, indifferent,...but it's still someone we were in our own personal timeline. For better or worse.
So next time someone wants to sit down with you and leaf through a mildewed photo album filled with photos of people you don't know, maybe just concede. Set your indifference aside and enjoy the story, or stories as I'm sure there's many. Sure, you don't know those people but they did. They're sharing their life's puzzle pieces with you. They're telling their story to you, one Polaroid or Instamatic at a time.
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