When Pictures Are Pieces of Our Lives

Two things happened to me yesterday that came entirely out of the blue.  There were a few other things that were out of the ordinary yesterday, but these two things were complete surprises, beyond my imagination when the day started.


The first was when I was walking my dogs at the crack of dawn.  I was headed out for a 10K run and I needed to get a cup of coffee and for Cactus and Slim to empty their bladders.  It was drizzling.  A typical rainy Vancouver winter day that just happened to be the opening day of the 2010 Winter Olympics.  As I headed to my usual coffee shop and my usual morning triple Americano, I spotted the unusual.  From a sagging, soggy, sorry-looking brown cardboard box, snapshots were spilling out into the rain.  As something of a back alley snoop, a trash picker and a voyeur, I had to look closer.  There was a photo album as well.


The box contained all the odds and ends that get tossed out at the end of the month by people moving, but these looked like the folks in question were in a hurry.  The album looked like it had been treasured once.  I was struck by the images of a woman in her late teens, early twenties at the oldest, who was dressed in clothes that dated her to the late seventies, maybe the early eighties.  She would have been a contemporary of yours truly.  As in most family album photos, she was happy and smiling.  Within a few pages, she was pregnant.  Beautiful, poignant shots of her with a big belly and a shining face.  Not many of whomever the father was.  A single mother?  Shortly there were shots of her with a newborn baby.  In the hospital.  At home.  A little girl.  Shots of her breast-feeding.  For the first time, I felt like a voyeur, an uninvited guest at a party, a trespasser on someone else memories.  These pictures were so personal and so private and so filled with love that it hurt to see them thrown out in the trash.  These pictures were anything but garbage.


As the album progressed through time, the pictures grew more interesting.  As time and pages passed, the little girl got older and became a stunning beauty.   I mean, this little girl became gorgeous.  And in her late teens, or early twenties at the oldest, she became pregnant.  Like her Mother before her, she had a great swollen belly, and a happy, beaming face.  Their was a boy. As handsome as she beautiful.  He wore a military uniform.  His face was placed up close on her belly.  He beamed.  She beamed.


She was in the hospital. The baby was born.  A happy couple with a new child.  Pictures of her breast-feeding, the shock I felt at seeing how the entire cycle of life was replicated from one generation to the next in the pages of a photo album.  It was eery.  And then the pictures of the boy in uniform, the handsome young man, were torn out of the album.  And the beautiful girl with the new baby was pictured by herself and then the album stopped and I was looking at it in the rain.


I was torn.  I felt like I was reading someone's diary, their most personal innermost thoughts.  Beyond voyeurism, it felt like an intrusion and a violation.  These pictures were irreplaceable.  How could they be thrown out?  What kind of personal pain and suffering and anger would make someone throw out pictures like these?  There were three generations of a family in this album.


Knowing I still had to walk my dogs, and get my coffee and meet a friend for my 10K run I left the album behind.  I wish I hadn't.  But then again, why would I rescue it?  To what purpose and what end?  I can't get those pictures, or those people out of my mind.  Who were they, what happened, how did it end?


I raced home to get ready to meet Ewa for our run.  I grabbed my new Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1 because it's both water-proof and shock-proof, my new running camera.  I had charged the battery, but it had no memory card, so I rummaged in my desk for one.  There, among the dust mice was an old card.  I put it in the camera and was shocked to see it had a couple of dozen images on it.  A friend's birthday party I had completely forgotten about.  My God, it was like being transported back in time.


I took the Lumix and went running with Ewa.  A great run.  Maybe the best 10K I've had in over a year.  I took pictures that will remind me for the rest of my life that it was the opening day of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.  For myself, and Ewa and her family, perhaps treasured keepsakes and vivid memories.  But I couldn't shake the vision of that discarded family photo album and those heart-breaking images of those beautiful young women and their babies tossed out in the rain.  Mother and daughters, three generations, lost in the garbage.

Today's theme is Canadian red, Olympic Mittens


- Vince Hemingson


PS  happy Birthday, Marlena