Voices in My Head

For over a month now I’ve been digging around in what is left of the tangible artifacts of my life with my parents and of their life before me. The entire contents fit inside a small U-Haul box and that my friends is very sad.

This all started because of a few things. Every so often over the past few weeks I’ve been dumping all my digital back ups onto an external hard drive. After a massive upload, a window popped up and this photo was the first to appear on my monitor.

I actually gasped. My mother’s face is so very pained. I took this photo when I was home for Thanksgiving in 1981. Then I remembered there was another one that my dad took of mom and me, so I dug it out and scanned it.

I’m not sure what is up with me but it is awful when I get in these moods. A few weird things fall into place and before I know it, I’m standing in front of my grandma’s house in the middle of nowhere, looking for ghosts and scaring my kid.

When the digging around in a few photos of my dad when he was a little kid starts, well then it’s best to just let the crazy in my head run to the sun until it’s over.

Add this to the timing of what would have been my fathers 86th birthday last Wednesday and this October marking the 10-year anniversary of his death and the 5-year anniversary of my moms death in December, and well, I get a little weird.

Anniversary is a strange word for the marking of a fucked up day isn’t it? Anniversary is a word that I always thought should be associated with a joyous event rather than an unpleasant one.

We should call it something else. I’m not really celebrating the death of my parents, am I? Regardless of what kind of prick he turned out to be or just how loony mom got, I’m not happy that they’re dead, am I?

I guess I’m not really anything. Well, that’s not true, I’m at the very least, disappointed. I’m disappointed that they both are dead. I’m disappointed that it was all just one big fucking disappointment for all of us.

Before they were those people, they were these people.

At least they looked normal when they were 18. Well, mom looks to be already depressed and well on her way to a lifetime of weird obsessions, addictions and anxieties. My mother, at the time of her senior photo, was a socialite who was ambitious and sweet. She was on the volleyball team, she played tennis (during the depression mind you) and was a ‘darn sweet kid’. I have no doubt about that at all. My mom was totally charming. Seriously.

After high school, mom helped my grandpa in his flower shop and waitressed at the Grotto. For about a year, she worked as a teller Pittsburgh Trust and Savings Company.

You would think that my parents would have met at the bank. When mom was a teller, dad hadn’t yet started his career in banking. He was still building houses with grandpa. Dad didn’t start in banking until right before they were married in 1949. My parents met at a Grotto picnic where mom was working the liquor table.

I really don’t know much about my mom because there really isn’t much to go on. I only have a few things of hers and none of it is very descriptive. Basically she liked to drink, smoke and socialize. She didn’t marry until she was 27, living at home until then. She had a boyfriend when she met dad, I know this because when mom and dad used to fight she would bring up how she should have married Jimmy. I’m sure she wanted to ‘be’ something but she never really indicated what that might have been.

In the photo of my father, he is 17 and getting ready to go off to WWII. But at the exact time of this photo, my dad was a photographer. A ’snapshot’ of him said that he was…’often found in the darkroom while at Carnegie High School’.

He was the Treasurer of the Hi-Y club; Newspaper Staff Photographer; President of the Camera Club; Treasure of the Athletic Association; Staff photographer of the SEE Newspaper, and he was on the Dance Committee. I’m guessing the Dance Committee thing was a way for him to meet girls.

Soon after his senior photo, he was sent to Minnesota where he enrolled in special training program. He had a high school diploma with college level algebra, trigonometry, analytic geometry and a year of physics under his belt.

My dad was trained in Meteorology at the University of Minnesota. He studied weather until they moved him over to navigation. He ultimately ended up as a navigator in the Army Air Corps.

Where as Mom is the reason I’m so good at being crazy, dad is the reason that I am so good at direction. For as long as I can remember every time that I got in the car with him, he would throw a map at me and tell me to figure out how to get where we were going. He wouldn’t move the car until I told him where to turn or get off. He knew exactly where we were going he just wanted me to figure it out.

There were always cameras in the house, but they were kept far away in the back of the buffet in the dinning room. In hindsight, he probably had a few Brownies, and Polaroid’s but I do remember the Kodak Instamatic he whipped out at every holiday or major event. I have one photo that he took of my mom and me on my high school graduation day from that camera. That is all I have even though there were thousands of photos that he took over his lifetime.

I remember that moment. It took forever for mom and me to put our arms around each other. It was an awkward point in time for all of us.

When dad was alive, I never made the connection that he actually was at one point in his life a creative person. My dad was major left-brain, but apparently he had some major right-brain leanings. I am kind of the flip. I am hefty right brained but I have this disturbing logical OCD thing going on. None of any of that explains why he was so dead set against me being an artist. All it does is confirm the conflicted messages that I grew up with.

My dad took some amazing photos of my mom when they were dating and then for the first few years of their marriage. Black and white, smiling faces, great camera angles and general 1950s happy-to-be-alive photos. I wish I had them only because they are so not like anything I’ve ever known either one of them to be.

But the sad truth is that I could make up more of a family story with photos from a thrift store than I can with my own family. For someone who is incredibility visual that is a problem. It sucks knowing that everything is just gone. It really does.