A record

I bet that hold a record for forgetting. Back in 1991, I had this roll of film developed. I must have carted it around with all my stuff since college. I think it was 1991, because when I got the contact sheets back I remember thinking, “Damn, this was taken 27 years ago!”

At first I didn’t think this film was mine. The people who developed the film must have used their best guess in terms of chemicals and developing time. They did pretty good, considering.

I printed frame 1 and blew it up.

This is my father! I almost didn’t recognize him…

That’s him alright.

The other clue was that circled frame 3 is a side view of our house.

How did I place the year?

Frame 2 shows a dinosaur, and since I know I wasn’t around 6,000 years ago (ha, ha, ha, that’s a joke), I knew it was probably at the 1964 worlds fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I remember that great big car tire in the background.

Here it is 22 years after I first discovered these ‘lost’ photographs.

How is this relevant to my blog mission?

I try to keep my blog relevant to issues surrounding siblings of autistic or severely handicapped brothers or sisters, with particular reference to my older brother.  Perhaps it is only my personal experience, and has nothing to do with being a sib, but I am particularly sensitive to memories (Memory, Seeds of Memory, Memory Revisited) and forgetting (Time, Keeping Honest). Finding this bit of the past unseen since the photons originally struck the silver nitrate, was a bittersweet experience.

Even though photographs are supposed to reflect reality, this roll of film represented some of my memory of the long-ago past as they are in my mind: foggy and somewhat unclear. Although I have complained that photography lies, in this case it faithfully represents images in my mind’s eye.