Generations

About two years ago I had the graphic artist at my job scan a whole bunch of family photos for me and touch them up where she could. My plan had been to devote an entire wall in my apartment to these photos. Well, two years passed and they were still not printed or hung on the wall. It wasn't until I was shamed by my brother and sister-in-law, who within like a week of moving into their apartment had the entire place covered in family photos, that I decided it was time to get my project underway at last. So the last week has been spent purchasing frames, printing the photographs, carefully cutting the images and arranging them on the wall.

I have been getting lost in the pictures...in the faces that are looking back at me...and their stories. I have three photos of my maternal great-grandmother who died at 28 from heart failure...her 2-year-old daughter, my great Aunt, died a few weeks later. A photo of my paternal grandfather that I'm guessing was taken while he was studying at Harvard. My father, his sister and their parents posing in their Philadelphia home just before World War Two broke out. My mother's high school graduation picture which was taken during the Vietnam War. Pictures of my brother and I acting goofy...a late night in the summer of 1986 with nothing to do and then we found a camera with film in it.

I wonder what some of their lives were like. What they were feeling when the images were snapped. The hardships they faced. For instance, my great-grandmother who died at 28 was an immigrant from Italy. How hard was life for her when she came here? Did she speak English? Was she sick before she died, or was it sudden? Did she know her two-year-old was dying or did the baby pass quickly too? No one knows the answers to these questions...they were lost in time. I suppose it's my curiousity of these things that started my journal keeping habit when I was about 17. Maybe no one will ever want to know those things about me or my family four generations from now, but what if someone does? What if my great-grandaughter hangs a photograph of me in her apartment one day and wonders who I was and what I thought about life. I'd like to think I could give her some answers.