Dear Blog Reader
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. The fire
wood gathering is moving into full gear. It is a yearly post Labor Day ritual
at the Sharritt house. The goal is very simple; ten cord of split wood stacked
up neatly on the concrete slab by the 2nd week of December. I will
then head inside for my long winter’s nap.
Last week the blog took an unexpected turn. It was headed
towards the picture of Ben and his skateboard crew. It got there it just went
via different avenue than I had expected. I had expected it to start out at a
family reunion in mid-August. The Kincade’s, not the Kincaid’s (all you Kincade
wanna-bes,) got together to look each other over; see how the grandkids and the
great grand kids are doing; and give reports on those who were unable to be
with us this year.
This year had a special treat. My Aunt Jo has moved into
assisted living. My cousin Pam is working hard at getting everything around;
having sales and working at getting everything in order to sell the house. This
gigantic task unearthed a bunch of pictures. You know pictures, photos, those
square bits of color and black and white images etched on a thick and semi
rigid paper. Yeah those predecessors to the things you keep on your cell phone,
data sticks and hard drives by the thousands. The only difference is back then you
had to be interesting enough for someone to take a picture of you; no selfies in
the 2000’s.
Really hasn’t the cell phone lessened our love affair with photography?
The narrow view of the selfie has sorely limited the usefulness of photography.
Anybody can go around taking pictures of their big heads at arm’s length with
just a hint of background to try to give the viewer context. Take this selfie
for example, one would be hard pressed to know that I had moved away from the
Whitehouse tour group and surreptitiously snapped this photo in the Green Room
just off the Lincoln Bedroom. Instead it looks like I am a vaguely surprised 50
year old trying to figure out how to hit the camera toggle on my phone so that
I can take a selfie. Add lines on the wall and you would have my first mug
shot.
In the good old days, with photos taken at more than an arm’s
length, you got perspective. You would get a picture of the family standing in
front of panoramic view of the mountains, families in front of the Tilt-a-Whirl
at the fair, families on the edge of a mountain stream with a Grizzly Bear
stalking them some distance off moments before said bear rushed them and
carried off grandma. This of course necessitated the need to develop the video
camera so that the entire sequence of events could be video graphed and the
entire video sent to America’s funniest home videos; later replaced by YouTube.
Families that is except for the “picture taker” in the
family. They were always left out. Their talent for capturing the meaning of
the moment through the view finder doomed them to a life of anonymity. The
lovely Miss Beverly loves to take pictures, and I was not considerate enough to
think about taking pictures of her very often. So she was the photographer in
our family. Someday the Sharritt Family biographer will incorrectly assume that
I was a single father bravely raising Ben and Grace. “Here is Roger with Ben
and Grace on the first day of school. One can only imagine how much easier
raising these two wonderfully well rounded children would have been had not the
lovely Miss Beverly not abandoned the family shortly after their birth.”
So the Kincade’s sat there on an August, Sunday afternoon
looking at pictures that had been well preserved but poorly documented, and I
found myself doing something that I had often ridiculed my parents for at
earlier editions of the annual Kincade family reunion. I reminisced. “That must
be Dad Kade. Look that is Pam and Carol Ann. I don’t know what was going on but
I sure wasn’t happy. Oh look, it’s Pop. No wonder you called him Uncle Tubby.”
We remembered the long dead and the much older. We didn’t recognize those who
had changed too much or were only on the periphery of our lives and commented
about how little some of us had changed. We did not learn from previous mistakes.
We did not document the remembered on the backs of photos or the best
guestimates of the year this or that photo was taken.
All of that was therapeutic. Remembering, and backfilling
stories helped jog memories of who I am and some of the things that colored my
life. Aunt Jo and Pam were gracious in dividing
up the photos and letting us take them home. I took photos of Jr. High and high
school dad, mom and dad dating, Pop (my grandfather) in front of loads of
pumpkins, Christmas shots of all kinds, campaign pictures of dad when he ran
for township trustee and lost to a future felon, (a loss that made an eight
year old father worshiping son despondent), and cousins, cousins, cousins.
My favorite? None really, or actually, it shifts to the next
one that I pull out and use to pull back memories; the one on top that says to
me “oh I see that in me today. It’s that little piece of me right there.” Like
the one on top of the pile today, it is a picture of 7 year old Roger. I am
wearing 6 year old Roger’s cloths because I have been out mucking around on the
farm; the cloths that fit were for school and church. The coat sleeves are too
short. The shirt cuts off at the belly button. The pants wouldn’t get wet in an
hundred year flood. I am standing on the concrete drive in front of my
Grandparent’s house (the house I live in today.) Behind me is my Aunt Jo’s car.
Behind it is my parent’s red Pontiac (my dad’s favorite car ever). Behind that
is a maple tree that has been gone for twenty years and is now replaced by two
good sized oak trees which is backed by the tool shed that I tore down 15 years
ago. I am missing a front tooth and holding a dead muskrat in my hand. Which
means, that even on a gray cold November day, I am happy because I have $5.25
to spend for Christmas; five dollars for the muskrat and twenty-five cents for
the tooth.
Thank you, whoever took that picture. It looks perfectly focused to me.
Take care
Roger
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