Lessons from the Photo Box
By Tom Purcell
Here's something you should do if you haven't done so in a while: visit your mother and father and get out the old photo box.
Surely you have one. Ours is in my parents' hall closet. It's in a sturdy old Pabst Blue Ribbon beer case.
Lucky for me, I needed some photos for a humor speech I am giving about growing up in the '70s and I had a reason to go through the old photos.
As my mother and I dug through the box, I came across a black-and-white photo of a little girl. She's holding a stuffed toy as she looks, suspiciously, into the lens of the camera.
That photo was taken 69 years ago, when the girl had her whole life before her. She didn't know yet that one of her sisters would be struck with polio 12 years later, that her father would die at 49 just a month before her wedding, or that she'd have six healthy children and 17 grandchildren.
That was my mother's picture. It was taken when she was 2.
I found my father's black-and-white high-school graduation photo. He was trim and handsome -- a thick head of hair. The photo had red coloring around his lips. When I asked my mother what it was, she explained.
When he was away in the Army,
she used to kiss the photo. The red coloring was her lipstick.
My parents' wedding photos are striking -- both of them so young and attractive. She was 19 and he was 23. They had very little money, but it was 1956, a time of hope and optimism. They were intent on building a life together.
Many other photos from over the years show that they succeeded.
The old Polaroids, in their greenish, yellowy hue, documented so many instances in their lives: the new home built in 1964; Jingles, our beloved dog born in 1972, getting a bath, which she hated; birthday parties, Christmas mornings and many other family events.
The newer photos document the thinning and graying hair, the high school and college graduations, the surprise party we threw for my father when he turned 50 and, eventually, the surprise retirement party.
These photos transport me right back to those moments I knew as a kid, both sad and happy: the cold January day in 1972 when my grandmother died and my father sobbed; the sound of my father driving around the neighborhood calling out for our dog the time she disappeared for three days; the Friday evenings sitting around the dinner table laughing with my sisters about everything and nothing at all.
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