“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” said Shakespeare’s Ophelia.
I do love rosemary. The scent. And the taste in food.
Speaking of memory, I am fascinated by this quote:
“He who remembers his childhood better
Than others is the winner,
If there are any winners at all.”
from “1924” by Yehuda Amichai
What do you think he means by that?
I wonder if it has to do with learning from our pasts?
Do you think about memory very often?
I think that I do, but sometimes it is because I feel a sense of responsibility for what I haven’t even asked for. For instance, big batches of old family photos keep turning up in my care. I have been scanning the lot of photos from my mother’s house when she moved from the garden home to the “big house” which is the apartment building in her retirement community (now she lives in a different building, in assisted living). Nobody else was going to do this, so I felt responsible for the photos. My grandfather and my father had put a lot of time into taking pictures.
Then yesterday a big box shows up on my porch. My brother sent me all the photo albums that were left over.
Eventually I have to organize all my scans and post them where family members can get them. Or some such.
In the meantime, I do feel some stress over it.
But then I find photos that bring me back to a moment in time. I went on a trip to California with my parents and brother between 7th and 8th grade. My father had quit smoking, and the money he saved went toward the trip. Our goal was to head down to LA to visit my cousins, but we landed in San Francisco for a few days. We found the intersection of Haight and Ashbury where I searched for hippies who were left over from the previous summer’s Summer of Love.
We ran into a filming of the TV show Ironside. I loved that show. Raymond Burr who played Perry Mason for years on TV now played a police chief who was in a wheelchair. One of the stars was Don Galloway. The scene being filmed on the street had Galloway outside and Burr’s stunt double inside a white van. My dad, never shy to ask, got Galloway to pose for a picture with my brother and me. I also got his autograph, but I don’t have that any longer. Can you dig my groovy yellow wrap-style sunglasses?
Of course, when I went back to school after our trip, I was so much more sophisticated than the previous year. Or so I thought!
Here’s another pic. In this one my brother and I (perhaps age 14) are playing Monopoly with my father at our house we lived at until I was done with junior high. I mentioned the game in Scrap, but game playing had an even bigger part in my childhood than I wrote about in the book. Monopoly was only one of several games, but it was the one most fitting for my father who began, when I was a teen, to collect buildings in real life in much the same way he did when playing the game. Because he didn’t have a lot of money to spend, they were usually older, run-down, in need of some TLC.
So I don’t need rosemary to remember. Just the drudgery of scanning old photos.
Or really anything. Everything reminds me of something before.
Having read Scrap and knowing what you relationship with your father was like, I can’t help but try and read into your expressions in those two photos. You aren’t smiling in either of them, but then again neither is your brother.
PS I love Monopoly even to this day! But I didn’t play with my parents, just my peers and now with my grandchildren. My father taught me chess and we played every night until I started beating him regularly. Then he taught my brother and played with him until he started beating him!
Haha, we are not smiling. In the MOnopoly photo, I am guessing that by all our expressions my father was winning. In the photo with Galloway pretty sure we were both embarrassed at my father asking for a photo and autograph. However, I was pretty starstruck.
I haven’t played Monopoly in years. My daughter played once for three days with my father and was beating him. He accused me of helping her aka he was pouting. Chess was a good teacher! I was given the rudiments, but my father had a close friend he played chess with. I would go with him to their house and play with the daughter of the house while my father and his friend were shut in the man’s study playing chess.
It sounds like both our fathers hated to lose! Not surprising…
LOL. That is for sure.
I love the photos! I also love rosemary! It has such a distinctive scent. I played a lot of Monopoly as a child. I remember we played it on rainy days when we could not play outside. 🙂
Is rosemary related to pine trees? It smells like it. I find the smell very invigorating! Yes, playing Monopoly when it rained. Or Candyland haha.
🙂 🙂 🙂
My husband has boxes of slides most of them are from when his kids were young. He talks about getting them scanned but there they sit taking up room. Tomorrow we are donating 7 bags/boxes of stuff and tossing out a lot. Yesterday I went through my sophomore yearbook. I decided I’d just keep my senior year one. I was stunned to find that I wasn’t in any of the photos except the head shot that’s taken at the beginning of the year. It was a throwback for sure — hairstyles, even the names of people all dates to that time.
Oh, that stroll down memory lane! Were you not in any clubs? Sports and clubs is how most people ended up in pix, I think, although senior year a friend took a couple of photos of the gardener and me that went into the yearbook. But I wasn’t really in anything in high school, too anxious to do it.
I was in some clubs and intramural baseball so I was surprised. Obviously I wasn’t involved when the photographer was there.
Oh, that is bad luck then! Wow, you were a social butterfly ;)!
Not exactly a butterfly. I flew under the radar mostly.
A butterfly more than I was. I was more like a lady bug flying “away home” at the least bit of anxiety.
Photos can trigger so many associated memories!
So right. Things we’ve all but forgotten.
I’m also the keeper of family photos, but I just don’t have the energy to scan them. I’ve started cousin FB pages and have posted several there, but . . . I cousin’s son on Dad’s side wants all those, and all the research I’ve done! I’m grateful for that.
Oh, you are so blessed to have someone who is interested! Scanning is so time consuming. I just found a discounted rate for a place to do some scanning of the rest of the stuff from mom’s home I got 3 years ago. I can’t keep doing this. And now with the new albums from my brother, it’s too much. So I’ll move onto scanning those next myself and send off this last box to an expert after I pare it down to the “necessities.” It’s very expensive. But I am getting too overwhelmed with all this.
Your brother looks like he is not having a good game in the Monopoly photo. Thanks for sharing, Luanne.
Hah, he was little, so of course he wasn’t doing well. Thanks, John!!!
That must have been fun to see “Ironsides” being filmed! Very groovy shades. My dad would let my brother win at board games because little George would get so upset when he lost.
LOL. That sounds like my daughter. She threw a fit once when she lost at Upwords. She is the youngest of the 4 of us! Those shades were so groovy. Not that good to see out of though haha. So funny about Ironsides. Tom T Hall: “The guy who ran the bar was watching Ironsides on TV.” Yup, that’s what we used to call it.
I didn’t care who won, if it meant that a boring game would be over.
Hah, I get that. But usually I would get competitive, maybe as a way to not be bored! Or because my father’s cockiness annoyed me.
I’m not sure how much I’d remember without photos and diaries. You have a wealth of materials! I do like your yellow sunglasses, actually. 😎
Hah, thank you. They were more for looks than because they worked so well. I do have so many materials. A blessing and a curse.
Cool photos! The car behind you guys is cool!!
I was thinking that, too. I wonder what kind of car and if it was part of the shoot or belonged to someone involved.
It’s commendable you are taking on this task!
Such a classic photo, the one of you and your brother with the actor Don Galloway. I read that after retiring from acting in the early nineties, Galloway worked briefly as a real-life deputy sheriff in California.
I read that, too! Pretty cool. He was a very handsome guy with a suave manner, perfect for 60s TV. But maybe he got the bug for law enforcement from acting in Ironside!
This is wonderful! A big task, but oh the memories.
Huge task! Yes, the memories are worth it, I think!
😀
I love those photo so much. Especially the one with you, your brother, and Don Galloway. You look so composed. 💗