I’ve been in Memory Overwhelm lately. Recent torrential rains revealed a small leak in our garage roof, which was dripping into the area where I have been storing some of our family history. Boxes and boxes of albums, slide carousels and memorabilia were in there. Fortunately, the water only damaged a few of the boxes and not the contents. But I realized it was time to get things out of cardboard and into plastic containers. I also wanted to take a rough inventory of photos and artifacts that I might find useful for this blog.
I went out and bought eight large clear plastic crates (more expensive, but easier to view contents), and then almost immediately bought a dozen more. The slides and photos of the many trips my parents took around the world I put away without sorting and started in on organizing my own stuff.
I never realized what a packrat I’ve been. Long forgotten memorabilia surfaced. In November I blogged about being a grip for a KQED auction during my high school days – and here was my plastic ID tag from that event. I was delighted to find that I had saved a French newspaper from when Eddy Merckx won his fifth Tour de France, probably one of the most iconic cycling news editions ever! Love letters from college sweethearts; painful let’s-just-be-friends notes from others. My high school aptitude test, ski racing ribbons, Pinewood Derby cars – all future blog fodder.
At times, I felt like Aladdin in the Cave of Wonders, with too many treasures to count. Then a note from a long-lost college buddy or a photo of a departed South Knoll Road neighbor would plunge me into an abyss of melancholia. As I read hundreds of greeting cards from graduations and birthdays, I despaired over how rich my life had been as a child and all the hopes those around me had had for my success. Had I measured up to any of their expectations?
Next, I tackled my theatre mementoes. Old programs, posters, photos and reviews were sorted by show and filed alphabetically. What I found most engrossing were the notes from fellow cast members and those whom I had directed. These heartfelt wishes on opening nights and closings caught my imagination and brought be back to why I love the theatre so much – the intense work, the camaraderie and intimacy, the ad hoc family that is created and broken apart with each show. It all made me eager to tap into that energy again.
Finally, I delved into the Clark family history. Fortunately, my dad had done a pretty good job of going through the photo albums from his parents and grandparents before he closed up the old house, carefully labeling what he could. I have to admit that I was hoping to find some photos of my own very early childhood, pictures that had always seemed to be missing. There was the well-thumbed album of black and white photos of my brother and sister cavorting in diapers with a bucket and hose on my grandmother’s lawn in Fresno (no doubt the temperature was hovering above 100 degrees), but none of Yours Truly. Yes, there was the single photo of me riding a rocking horse in our living room, but where were the rest? We used to joke that my dad had burned out on taking pictures of John and Kathy and that I was simply old news, baby-photo-wise.
It was when I was looking for a picture of Goose Lake (Cheerios and Salmon Eggs, July 2010) to add to that blog post that I found my answer. First, I tried an Internet search, but the alkaline jet ski-infested lake I found online looked nothing like my memories. So I re-read that portion of my dad’s memoires and found that one of the few camping trips my mother had consented to take was to Mammoth Lakes. Could I be mistaken? I went back to the boxes in the garage and came across a single album of large 2 ¼ inch Kodachrome slides. I had ignored it initially because the first pages were photos from the National Guard and Mexico, but then I hit the Mother Lode.
Here were color pictures of our house being built in 1956 at 38 South Knoll, of my maternal grandmother on a rare visit from Connecticut and holding me in her arms while sitting on a chair in our newly-poured driveway. Groupings of neighborhood kids on our pristine front steps, my sister playing with a crude homemade train (my dad’s work?), and dozens of slides of me as a little boy in the yard and with my family at the beach.
I hadn’t been a victim of family neglect, just one of advancing technology. The medium-format color slides could only be projected one-at-at-time, so they were almost never brought out, and color prints were probably too expensive at the time and certainly not printable at home, the way my father made enlargements from black and white negatives.
Then I found what I was looking for: slides of that camping trip I had remembered. Here was an actual picture of me riding on my father’s saddle and cradled in his arms – one of my first memories – and another of our tent where I had gotten my unusual bucket-bath one stormy night. There was also an intriguing photo of us, taken in front of a Park Service trail sign. I got out a magnifying glass and all was revealed – it pointed the way to Duck Lake, not Goose Lake. I got out a map of the Sierras and quickly found Duck Lake and neighboring Pika Lake, where I learned how to fish. As I thumbed through the album I whooped and hollered. This was simply amazing stuff to me. The cloudburst of my emotions rivaled the rainstorm outside.
There is so much to take in that I now feel like an archaeologist at the beginning of a dig. This will take some time and I know I will sometimes have to fight back the tears as I am haunted by the ghosts of time gone by in those slides and elsewhere in mountain of memories in the garage. I am glad that the family history is now enclosed in plastic boxes, to keep everything dry. But how will I manage to keep myself from washing away?
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