Stories

About 15 years or 20 years ago I started writing what turned out to be an unintentional book. 

I hadn't found all the ancestors I wanted to find yet, but I had gained a reputation around the family for collecting old photos and instead of throwing them away, people sent them to me. I scanned all the photos and slides starting with the birth of my older sister and ending at the year we had all gone our separate ways and were no longer a family as we'd been. There was no single place we were all coming home to anymore. That covered 27 years. 

I split the mishmash of 8mm movie clips that had been transposed to DVD into shorter segments and dated them. I cropped and color-corrected all the photos. The slides had to be professionally cleaned because I couldn't do it at home without dying from the inhalation of alcohol fumes. I scanned and dated all of those because thankfully someone had put dates on them in pencil. Then I split the whole works into folders by year and then I moved them around and renamed them individually so the story line was in order. 

In some cases the pencil dates were wrong because a photo that belonged to a certain story line was attached to the wrong year. But with time and persistence, eventually I had it lined up pretty well.

At that point I went back to the pesky missing ancestors and got obsessed with DNA. A totally different story. 

When I came back to the photos and movie clips I realized no-one in the future was going to understand this without captions. So I set my sights on putting captions on each photo and a simple text document to catalogue the movie clips. I might have been 5 minutes into this when I realized it was a really bad idea. What I thought I should do instead, and started to do, was create a document for each year and write a brief description of a whole year at a time, 27 times, using the pictures as memory triggers.  

I thought that would be a fairly efficient approach and I'd be done in no time. 

Of course I couldn't stop there because what was most interesting to me about the stories was what was going on behind the camera, not what was in front of it. Who cares about "4 girls sitting in the living room in November"? 

I convinced myself it wouldn't be a good idea to leave a lot of imagery without an explanation of, "What in the world was going on there?" This was clearly demonstrated to me by an acquaintance who was looking through an album one day, back when I had albums ...  which can be a really boring thing to do, looking at other people's pictures when you don't know any of the people involved. He turned a page, turned to the previous page, turned forward and then back again several times and said, Happy kid, then sad kid, what happened here? He really wanted to know.

By now each folder of photos and videos has a document called [Year] The Story. I work in outline form in ActionOutline and when I make additions or changes to a year, I save it as RTF and overwrite it in the appropriate folder. If I print the entire thing now it's 132 pages including a brief intro of Mom and Dad at the top, how they met, married, where they lived and how they imagined their future before it launches into the kid pics and the reality of watching it all play out. 

As I've written I've gone further and further into the labyrinth. At times I've felt in a hurry to finish it because, you know, the past is the past. At times I've taken breaks from it for months. And then a memory pulls me back looking for the right words. 

It's my book; I get to write it any way I want it. Sometimes I draw pictures. Sometimes I write short vignettes as sub-items. I found the first house I lived in on Google Maps. The surprising thing about this is that the Google Street View car had been down that street for the first time ever only one month before I went looking for the house and that was last year. I could see it from 3 sides close up and zoom in on the side of the back porch. Although I couldn't see the back door I imagined my father walking through it. I checked out the whole neighbourhood like it was yesterday on my tricycle. I wasn't supposed to leave the yard but I used to go all the way to the end of our block and back.  

The way the years are set up to save and re-save by overwriting, it's an endless book. Like Margaret Atwood said, "It's just between you and the wastebasket." Perspectives change. It will stop when I stop. Sometimes the stories take off into strange lands and serve the job of a psychiatrist and there I am seared to my core seeing myself reflected back through the words that come out of me. The past is oftentimes nowhere near as past as we think it is. You may or may not want to do this to yourself.