Pictures of the Past

Weekend Assignment 22: Got a photo you really love? Show it and tell us why. It'd be nice if the photo was one you haven't shown on your site before, but doing a repeat of an especially meaningful picture is groovy too.

I'm not a terribly visual person, so photographs don't usually do that much for me.  Nevertheless, here are a few candidates for this assignment:

This one took second or third place in a photography contest, circa 1987. I took it in Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Samuel Clemens, during our 1986 wanderings with the bed in the back of the Dodge van and Jenny Dog on the bed.  I don't think we even said hello to the people with the horses, but their dog lives on in this picture.

The second photo I may never have seen until tonight, but when I did see it, it nearly made me cry.  I don't know who took the picture. I found it in a drawer of my mom's end table, part of the remains of her estate that's filling up our front room until I get around to dealing with it.

The one who is standing is my Mom, Dr. Ruth Anne Johnson, when she was still relatively healthy.  During this era she was still teaching speech and drama at Barry University, despite the occasional minor stroke. Once she signed herself out of the hospital after a stroke to go teach. "I couldn't even walk straight," she told me later, "so I danced."

Next to her is my aunt, Flora Johnson, who wasn't doing very well at all. She demanded more attention than Mom was any position to give at that point.  Mom did her best, at the expense of her own health. (Aside to my cousin, Aunt Flora's daughter, Verna, if she finds this entry: I've lost your contact info! Email me!)

I think the cat shown here is the brain-damaged, way too much trouble, flea-ridden, non-loving one whose name I've forgotten, not Silver Girl, whom Mom loved and who died young.

The third picture isn't terribly good from a technical standpoint,but it's among the most memorable of the many pictures I took the summer after seventh grade.  Joel Rubinstein, who had been my best friend since first grade, was about to move to Maryland.  Until the time came for his family to leave and for mine to go up to Lake Ontario on vacation, Joel and I spent a lot of time together, hanging out and taking pictures (of each other, of our houses and of Manlius) with three different cameras. This one is of Joel at Snook's Pond in Fayetteville, NY. I probably took it with my dad's Instamatic, but it may have come from the cheap camera I was using before that. Trust me: the Instamatic, despite the fixed four foot focus, was a step up from the all-plastic one that used flash bulbs, which was also a hand-me-down from Dad.  It could have been worse: I could have been using his old Brownie. I kind of like the way the camera overemphasized the contrast between the dark hillside and the lightstruck shore, making the people at the water's edge look more abstract than real.

The last picture isn't the murky photo you see here, but the framed photo depicted in the digital one. It's a prop from Quantum Leap, the "Good Night, Dear Heart" episode, in which Sam's obsessed with finding this young woman's killer.  The photo used to sit in the office of QL writer /story editor / producer Paul Brown, who won an award for the episode.

The late Tracy Ann Murray of Project Quantum Leap went halfsies with me on this at the charity auction, and then refused to take a turn keeping it at her house. The picture means more to me now because of Tracy than because of Quantum Leap.

I notice that other journalers are mostly posting pictures of weddings or family members for this assignment.  Sadly, the best of the pictures of my wedding to John are in a box somewhere, probably under other boxes in the back of a room full of boxes.  They were in a photo cube that used to be in the living room or bedroom when we lived in Columbus. I haven't seen that cube in years and years. My favorite of the wedding photos had me wearing my new denim jacket over my wedding dress.  I thought of posting John's before and after picture of his tremendous weight loss (over 100 pounds), but it rather depresses me because of my lack of success in this area.  And, as you may know, we were unable tohave kids, so there will be no pictures of little Romana or Alex (that would have been their names).

So which of these photos means the most to me?  I think I have to go with the one of Joel, in memory of one of the best summers (and later, one of the worst) that I ever had.

Karen

Tags: Weekend Assignment, Photos, Memories