A former colleague and friend has agreed to help me include photographs in the body of the book that I have written. I’ve spent a great deal of time  to that end sorting through boxes and albums containing images of family members that tell as powerful a story as the one that I have related with phrases, sentences and paragraphs. The old saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words and I have been reminded of the truth of that statement as I study each of the snapshots from my family’s history that have been forever captured in black and white, Kodachrome and pixels.

After my mother died my brothers and I spent many hours inside her home dividing up her few belongings. I was amazed at how many cards, drawings, letters, invitations, programs and photos she had saved. I found pictures that I had never before seen that had long languished inside boxes. It appeared that at some point my mom attempted to identify the people and the places so that we might one day have a clearer understanding of her personal history. The best of the lot were the black and white images from the nineteen forties when she was young and her whole adult life lay before her. Many of those images held commentaries such as “Those Happy Days” or “Such a nice person.” It was as though she wanted us to understand who she had been when the road before her was still based mostly on dreams.

I so enjoyed seeing my mother with her brothers and sisters, mugging for the camera, walking arm in arm down 1940’s Houston streets, and looking so incredibly young and beautiful. There were at least two quite handsome young men whose photos she kept, noting that they had purchased engagement rings for her before she had even met my father. One of them was killed during World War II and the other she turned down even as she noted that he was always a gentleman. I mostly loved seeing the pictures of my grandparents when they were younger than I remembered them, younger than I am now. I lingered over the postcards and panoramas from trips that Mama had taken. I laughed to learn that she traveled alone to San Diego when she was only seventeen to visit with a friend, demonstrating the daring spirit that would always define her.

My favorite photos were the ones that showed my mother and father flirting with one another during their courtship and early days of wedded bliss. It was almost shocking to see how young and in love they were. They mugged and teased in the style of the day. Mama vamped on top of automobiles and Daddy leaned on lamp posts gazing at my mother as though he had just won the lottery. Mama carefully recorded her feelings on so many of those pictures that show them in the first blush of their courtship.

Eventually the chronology of their life together led to photographs of me and my brothers. They took noticeably fewer snapshots of each other once we were born. Their lives appeared to shift focus. Their own visages became more serious. Instead of looking at each other they looked adoringly on us. Nonetheless, one image taken only months before my father’s shocking death shows them holding hands while walking down the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas. It provides a testimonial of the depth of their feelings for one another. It shows one of those rare moments away from their children when they were relaxed and still so much in love.

The remainder of the memories are the story of our family life without our father. Somehow we managed to hit all of the milestones and find our own special kind of happiness. Of course that was mainly due to our mother’s determination to provide us with the safety and security that we needed at a time when our futures appeared to be so bleak. She did a yeoman’s job and somehow found the inner strength to provide us with a show of optimism in spite of our circumstances. I would find notations and writings that indicated the truth of the struggle that she silently and bravely endured.

My mother remained a pretty lady for all of her days. She possessed a radiance and unselfish spirit that drew people to her. Her albums are filled with memories of celebrations and parties and the people who meant so much to her. Eventually she grew tired and her friends became less energetic themselves. Many of them even died. She spent a great deal of her time alone. She collected readings from the Bible and verses that appealed to her. She wrote about the positive aspects of suffering and how enduring pain and loss had only made her feel closer to Jesus.

I discovered aspects of my mother’s personality and life story that I had never before known. I was able to gaze objectively into her world, not as her child but as a fellow human being. She had kept pieces of her heart hidden away and it felt amazing to get to know her in a whole new way. She became more real to me than she had ever been. I began to understand her on an almost spiritual level and I was awash with gratitude for all of the sacrifices that she had made for me and my brothers. It was a truly humbling experience to take a marathon tour of her memories.

We each travel through the modern world recording our own histories with selfies and images of the people that we know and the places to which we travel. Our faces and expressions tell stories of our passages through time. I wonder how many of our most special memories might one day be tossed away or deleted by distant descendants who don’t even know who we are. Will there be no one left to understand the meaning of our poses and our smiles? 

Whenever I eat at a Cracker Barrel restaurant I find myself looking at the old portraits lining the walls. I wonder who the people are and how their pictures ended up so impersonally decorating a place where nobody knows their names. There is a kind of sadness in knowing that their fate has become being a caricature of an era long past. It seems wrong that their lovely photographs have met such a lonely fate.

I now have a new goal. I plan to organize the thousands of photos that are in my possession. They will be far more meaningful for the next generation and those that come in the years long after I am gone if I take care in identifying their importance. My first step is going to be to include some of them inside the covers of my book so that my readers will have faces to put with the grand story of a little family that did its best to muddle its way through life. I hope that my words will equal the grandeur of how special they really were. Perhaps then the people that mean so much to me will find a way to live on forever.