CUL-DE-SAC

I was weeding through my parents’ old photos after their move to an old folks home and I threw away one I should have kept. It was one of me dancing with a belly dancer. You know how it is. You’re at a party. Someone hired a belly dancer and as a gag they tell the dancer to make me come up and dance with her.

In the photo the dancer is in the background and there I am in a suit and tie doing some stupid move.

I first thought, ‘Who would want to see that besides me?’ But there was a story behind it, and I don’t think my kids ever saw me doing anything like that so they might get a kick out of it. So I went out to the trash bin and dug through the many photo albums I’d thrown away to try to find that one picture. The party was in Minnesota so I thought I was getting warm when I found some other pictures from that time. But no luck.

Of course something else happened and this happens a lot in life. When you’re pursuing something you think you want, you end up finding something better. At the bottom of the trash bin, once I’d pulled out all the photo albums, there was a photo that has fallen out of one of them. It was my mom when she was running the orchestra program for the schools in my home town, Grinnell, Iowa. That belly dancing picture is only in my memory. But that’s okay because I’ve got this.

It’s February and the sun has started taking a longer path through the sky. Longer days means chickens laying more eggs. For a while they were laying one a day or less. The green eggs laid by the Ameraucanas were the most dependable, still coming in the dark December solstice. Eggs are cool. Especially when they don’t all look the same.

As you get old you downsize from the house to the condo to the apartment in the old folks home. All the old pans and plates, tools you don’t use, the old clothes that have lain in closets, basements and garages… they get tossed, sold or donated.

My parents just made the last move of their lives. I ended up with some of their stuff, including 40 photo albums. I was told to keep the pictures I wanted and get rid of the rest.

There were endless snapshots of vacations and events they considered important, friends of theirs I never knew and didn’t recognize. My father took most of the photographs and he was a terrible photographer. If there was a way to make a handsome person look bad he found it. He seemed to take pictures of everything, including maids and cooks at hotels where he stayed.

The things we have, including our keepsakes, are destined for the landfill just as we will be rendered unto dust. The same was true of these photos. Most of them ended up in the trash.  No loss.

I kept the photos that told the story of my family’s past. I also kept photos I just happened to like. Like I said, with my dad taking most of the pictures there were not a lot of those but they did crop up. As for my family’s past… There were snapshots of my mother’s farm family in depression-era Kansas. Girls in dresses made from flour sacks and boys in overalls.

There were the shots of my dad during WWII. Staged pictures of him in his blue navy uniform, and one with two buddies on a New York sidewalk right before they shipped out. There were two shots of the dance band he played in and the one of him smiling in a shop door in Southhampton, England, where he was stationed.

There were pictures of mom and dad in college and the pictures of their wedding, like the one above. Slowly the black-and-white photos turned to color, though they were colors that faded with the years.

When I threw away all of those old photos I was shedding memories but you don’t remember everything, and it seems like most of the photos we take are good to keep for a year or two. I think of this when I delete old photos I’ve kept on my iPhone. There comes a point when you’ve looked at a photo long enough and it no longer warrants the divot in your soul.

Now, those 40 photo albums have been reduced to two-and-a-half. I think it’s all we need.

Here’s a few more that I kept: