A large box of photographic slides

            It has fallen to me to go through my dad’s thousands of photographic slides and digitize the important ones.  They begin in the early 1940’s and end after the turn of the century.  After his death, I became the curator of the slides, as well as scrapbooks of prints.  Dad died at age 95, several years after my mother’s passing while Paula and I were in Peru, .  I had previously packed up the large collection and shipped them back to North Carolina, where they have stayed in the back of a closet for well over a decade.

            There are things that are apparent from the pictures.

            First, he had a good eye for, and found beauty in landscapes.  There are many examples of the discipline and it's clear that he appreciated natural wonders.  It saddened me to discard most of these pictures, but I knew that they wouldn’t mean much to future generations.  The colors in the slides are still glorious; many of them are now 75 years old.  If nothing else, they testify to the stability of the Kodachrome color process, especially in its early days.

            He also loved flowers.  It bothered me discarding literally hundreds of beautiful pictures of beautiful flowers, knowing how much he had enjoyed them.

            My father was an engineer, and valued precision.  His neat handwriting on the well-organized divisions of his slides testifies to this.

            Many of the pictures are of memorials and cemeteries.  It reminds me that the terrible Second World War was still a very recent and fresh memory when these slides were taken.

           He loved us kids.  Yeah, I'm the fat kid in the middle.  There were eventually six of us.

            He loved my mother.  I always knew it, but it is emphasized by how he framed her in his camera.  There are very few images that aren’t flattering to her.

            In keeping with Paula's and my desire to let things go, she persuaded me to finally let my father’s slide projector leave.  An hour or two before it was picked up by a photography enthusiast, I pulled off the worn cover of its box.  As always, I found it clean and in orderly condition (the fan and bulb still work), and I breathed in its aroma one last time.  It instantly brought back memories of sitting in the dark with my family as my dad went through favorite pictures of previous trips and Christmases and people we should remember, and we laughed at how funny we looked when we were younger.  You could feel the heat being blown off by the fan as my father opened boxes of slides and placed them in the spring-loaded tray.

            I’ve tried to pick out pictures that will mean something to future generations, and there are plenty of those.  I have stored them ‘in the cloud’ as well as on two hard drives; it has taken a lot of work to scan and organize them, but far more than that, they are important to the family as it branches out into the future.  They need to know more about this good man, and the pictures that he took will help them understand him better. 

            The hours that I have spent with them have done so for me.

David