Pending the resolution of my mother’s estate, I’ve been going through some scrapbooks. In the picture below, I’m sure you can guess the identity of the dashing young fellow in the sailboat sweater vest, thoughtfully stroking his chin. Or something.
And, in a later picture, there’s a skinny Brad Pitt on the left (yes, that’s David), and a skinny, uh, well, Uncle Fester on the right.
Maybe eyeliner might help?
Some History
Quite humorous that you have the same stroking the chin pose that has been present in contemporary photos. I linked to your other post about David this morning and just realized that last night, we were simultaneously posting childhood photos that included parents. I don’t use the time-stamp but I’m fairly certain my post was just a hair after midnight. Too funny.
Great Friday post, Mike. I love seeing pictures over time, watching yourself and family evolve. In May, 2002, I spent a weekend doing triage on my parents photo albums, dividing all the pictures among the seven children (according to who was pictured). It was like an intense review of a family over the entire 20th century.
Also, gotta tell you it’s a treat to access your blog on my new Powerbook. Everything is in place and I can respond from home.
Oh give me a break! Uncle fester at least had the ability to power a lightbulb under mouth power alone. How dare you compare yourself to such a cult hero. Regardless, when will you finally learn that it is not looks alone that make the women swoon…it is so much more, and you my friend are the king of “so much more”.
Famous quote from the past
“So, if you were traveling in a space ship at the speed of light would you still need headlights?”
I guess that would constitute an inside joke of sorts. Nice pic’s, bro. See ya.
Michelle, I love the pictures of the boys, and especially the old/young picture. It’s terrific, and makes me wish I had more pictures of my Dad’s mom. I’m heading out west for a wedding in a couple weeks, and I hope to get a lot of photos of my Mom’s family, most of whom I haven’t seen in at least ten years.
John, I always like your picture posts as well, and I especially enjoy your “here’s what I was doing 20 years ago today” posts — and I’d sure be happy to see more of those types of pictures, as well. All these photos and scrapbooks that came out of my Mom’s house have been a big and welcome education for me; a huge sense — one that I hadn’t had as much, before — of what my parents were like, from a perspective other than my own. It’s something, seeing your Mom with a bottle of Riesling on a blanket beside a German stream, and realizing she’s only 21 or 22; likewise for seeing your Dad grinning from the back of a quarter horse out in the back pasture of the family farm, and knowing that that’s how he got around, rather than a car, in rural Maryland in his teenage years. (His cousin Henry had perhaps the most ideal war service one might ever imagine: Henry got drafted into the Coast Guard, and did shore defense duty on the East Coast in Virginia and the Carolinas, riding a horse up and down the beach, looking for German submarines. Imagine a nation with its men overseas, and lonely women seeing a young man astride an emblem of virility at the beach, and you can imagine why WWII was very good to Henry.)
I’ve also enjoyed reading your Mac posts. I talked my Dad into switching to the Mac, mostly for Internet security reasons, and he’s actually become enthusiastic enough about the platform that he’s trying to talk my brother into getting a Mac when he gets out of prison.
Rob: thanks for the flattery, pardner, but I know you’re a married man. (Do you remember that drunk night in the barracks with AJ sitting on my lap and her telling me, “You’re really hot. . . In a geeky way” and you getting kinda mad?) Still: you’re right; I can’t hang with Fester. But you know I can dress like Gomez.
Family photos fascinate me with the unrehearsed way they tell the group’s story. Posed or not, these photos reveal so much through body language, facial expression, clothing, composition and kind (i.e. being able to afford to pose for a picture postcard in the old days; having a photo mark a family tradition and so forth).
I have a photo of my mother and myself, taken one year before she died. She sat in an armchair, wearing the suit we buried her in. I sat on the arm of the chair, a twelve-year old girl wearing a costume meant to suggest “The Happy Times” remembered by the elderly. We had just come home from a school musical that my brother and I had performed in. When I look at that snapshot today, I am taken with how old and sick she looked at 45 even though she held herself up and smiled at the camera.
At 47, I am older than my mother will ever be, and, like looking at pictures of one’s parents at younger, before parenthood moments in their lives, looking at my parent from my perspective of advancing years that she never had leaves me curious. Unsettled but understanding. It seems out-of-synch to surpass one’s parent’s age, yet beginning to be able to look at her as someone younger than me gives me much more compassion for what she went through than I have had in the years since her death. Compassion, I hope, will lead me to fuller forgiveness.
It’s always nice to look at your family pictures Mike. Just like wine, your photos get better and better as time goes by. You always remind me of those long forgotten family pictures I’ve kept inside a trunk. I think I should spend some time making some good stuff – say a scrapbook – out of those. That way, I would always have my parent beside me wherever I go.