Last night I completed a book. I don’t mean I wrote it, though it did involve a lot of writing, what I mean is that I put a lot of stuff between covers and it is now called a book - an album. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Well, let me explain.
A couple of months ago I decided that I wanted to put my book "Amazing Grace" - a story of my early life and awakening - back on the website but I also wanted to include a lot of photos that were not included in the print version because printing photos in a book makes the cost go too high. In order to include selected photos, that meant I needed to go through my photo collection. That presented problems.
You see, for over 30 years, I’ve been collecting photos. Some of these photos are those I have taken myself, but there was a whole LOT of them that I received as collections from various family members now deceased. In some cases, there were large boxes of photos - I mean like 12 x 18 x 10 inch boxes - that’s a LOT of photographs! In other cases, I received albums that were partially complete, with envelopes of photos yet to be included, and the albums themselves were a mess, jumbled and poorly organized. Add to that the many photos I have taken myself since my children were born and we are talking about a box of photographs the size of a sea trunk! Going through it was NOT going to be a one day job!
But, I dragged the huge plastic storage container (so big it has its own wheels!) out of my closet down to the dining room and proceeded to unpack it onto the table. Then I started going through photos quickly, sorting them into piles according to type and family line. I really wish I had taken a photo of this process but… Anyway, I then started sorting them in to sub-piles… getting according to chronology. My children came in to have a look and wanted to go through the photos but I stopped them saying that they couldn’t be messing with my organizational efforts! I then realized that these photos were doing nobody any good at all packed away in a box for years and years and me telling the kids not to look at them because they might disorganize them! So, I resolve to do what I had been telling myself that I WOULD do for years and years and years: put them into albums!
That, of course, delayed the prospect of putting Amazing Grace onto the web! And putting the photos into albums was delayed by having to find appropriate albums and materials that could deal with the collection. I needed big albums of a certain type and certainly particular methods of installing some very old and delicate photos. After a week or so, the albums arrived and I was able to find some good double sided tape tabs and transparent photo corners, and so on.
At this point, a lot of other things were going on and I wasn’t able to get to the project, so the stacks of photos and albums and tools sat on the dining room table waiting for me to "getaminnit" to work on it. Only I knew it wasn’t going to be just a minute! It was going to be a project taking several weeks of daily work! The enormity of the task just overwhelmed me and, in addition to having to do other things, I also was finding excuses to NOT begin! Heck, I didn’t know HOW to begin! How do you organize very old photos from different families that, only later come together? Do you just start putting them in strictly chronologically and hope that the viewer will be able to know who is who and how they connect? For example, I have a copy of a tintype taken in 1874 of the family of my paternal grandmother. Then I have photos of great grandparents on my maternal side, sisters of my great grandmother on my mother’s side, and so on. If I just stick them in together because they are associated in a chronological way, and continue in that manner, the "stream of life" of any one particular family will be lost in the mixing!
So, I decided to modify the plan; what I would do would be to start with my father’s family, proceed chronologically until the point in time when my parents married and then I would switch to my mother’s family and bring them along to the same point. Then I would proceed from there strictly chronologically, mixing photos from the same time periods from both families.
Of course the plan was slightly complicated by the fact that I also had photos from the grandparents families and I had to follow each line chronologically (to some extent) until the grandparents met and married and produced my parents!
Believe me, this was NOT an easy task! Thankfully, at one point in my life, I sat down with my grandmother and boxes of photos and she had me write on the back of each one who was in the photo and the approximate time. Also, thankfully, someone performed a similar service on many other photos in my collection. My maternal grandmother also collected news articles and obituaries of family members, so that was available to provide chronological data. I also had a lot of information in my genealogy program and a big binder with plastic sheet protectors full of birth, marriage, and death certificates for many family members that I had been collecting for the genealogy project that was an obsession some ten or so years ago. Still, there were a certain number of important photographs about which I had little or no information. I had to resort to a tedious and exhausting process of scanning, blowing up and examining photographs for clues to who was in them and what period they came from!
Now, all of the above is just the logistics of this project. No wonder I didn’t want to get started!
But, as it happens, Christmas is coming and we are going to need the dining room table - we can’t eat in the kitchen forever - and I knew that I was NOT going to put all those stacks of photos back in the box after having gone to the trouble of going through them, sorting and organizing them! I knew I had to start. I had painted myself into a corner. So, two weeks ago, I sat down and began.
Oh, Lord! I didn’t know it was going to hurt so much to organize the lives of my family! With each photograph I placed in the album, I knew I had to write a description so that my children could sit down and look at the album and know the details even if I am no longer there to describe who is who and what they are doing and why the photo was taken and what was going on in their lives in the background. And so, there was a LOT of writing going on. Some album pages are half text.
When I came to the photo of Aunt Minnie - my grandmother’s aunt and my great aunt - as a young girl, I had to decide what to write about her. There she was with her kind, sort of clueless, face. She didn’t know that she was going to marry an older man, that they would then have their only child later in life, that he would die soon after the child was born, and that the child would later be in an accident that transformed a laughing dancing little girl into a quadriplegic who lived that way for 40 years. Aunt Minnie didn’t know that she was going to devote her life to caring for her invalid daughter.
Then, there was Aunt Lizzie - sister of Minnie - who the whole family knew as "Evil Aunt Lizzie." Was I going to write some text telling why she was considered to be an evil, manipulative bitch? Don’t people say that you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead? Well, I’m not afraid of the dead coming back to haunt me so I thought it was proper to tell the story of Aunt Lizzie and how her only child finally escaped her clutches only to die at a young age from a heart attack - probably because his mother made him feel endlessly guilty. (This woman dressed that boy as a girl until he was almost 5 years old! You should see the photos of him with his long ringlets!)
Then, there was my great-grandmother Laura, after whom I am named, the most beautiful of the sisters and the one that suffered the most, too. She didn’t know that, when she married Mr. Reed in 1925 after 20 years being a widow, that two years later he would murder her! And the photos of my grandmother and her new husband and infant children (including my mother) did not give any evidence of this impending tragedy, though all the photos afterward are grim and unsmiling. It was a blow from which the family did not recover - even to this day. I felt obliged to explain what happened and to include the news article about the murder as well as copies of the marriage certificate in chronological order. How else to explain the "after" photos, their character, the faces, the obvious withdrawal of my grandmother from being photographed at all for almost 25 years.
There was a photograph of my father smiling impishly in his sailor suit before WW II. How to explain that his twin went on to have an illustrious military career, but that my father was so badly injured in an auto accident that he almost lost his arm (he did lose parts of it!) and was discharged from the Navy for medical reasons. There were photos of him before and after… and ever after, with one or two exceptions, when he was photographed it was with his left arm (the injured one), held jauntily in his pocket so that the fact that this arm was now several inches shorter than the other would not be noticed. Than certainly needed explaining!
And so on… I think you have the idea. It is a rare page in this album that only has a name and date under it; most of them have entire paragraphs of text beside each photo! So, it was a long process.
Anyway, last night I finally made it to 1949 and the end of the album. In a 150 page album, there were only 2 1/2 pages left blank at the end and I haven’t even been born yet! (I also did not include a LOT of photos that were not of people because they simply aren’t relevant to the story of the people!)
I took the finished First Album into the kitchen where everyone was having dinner to show that it was actually done, that we would soon be able to eat in the dining room! The kids pronounced the book to be similar to the book of Genesis in the Bible - the family history - but I could only say that it was more like Tragedy and Hope. It was the remembering and re-living the family history that was more the ordeal than the actual doing of the task. So much Hope followed by so much Tragedy, and then hope again. In the end, what is the lesson? What can we really learn from an accurate history?
Over and over again, when I consider this family history, I see that Hope is based on people just trying to do what is right according to their own understanding but the Tragedy comes in because their understanding is based on illusions or delusions; lack of accurate knowledge and sharing of information. Hope that is based on emotion based illusion seems to inevitably lead to tragedy. The evidence is right there in that 150 page photo album that displays the lives and times of a dozen or so families. And that reminds me of the saying of Santayana: Those that do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. This is true not only in a large, social sense, it is true in the context of families. We need to really know our history, know how we have been influenced by events of the past through our family members, and know their histories and what their choices led them to, so that if we don’t like their history, we can find a way to change it in our own lives. As Gurdjieff wrote:
Faith of consciousness is freedom
Faith of feeling is weakness
Faith of body is stupidity.
Love of consciousness evokes the same in response
Love of feeling evokes the opposite
Love of body depends on type and polarity.
Hope of consciousness is strength
Hope of feeling is slavery
Hope of body is disease.
My family album - "Genesis" as we will now call it - is evidence that these words are so true. And with the knowledge that I have - and have now put into a form that can be passed on to my children - I hope that we can all become free of false faith, love and hope.
