After I resurrected old slides from the cellar and scanned them (with a scanner I bought online for less than $100), I downloaded the photos to my computer. It was time-consuming but easy and so worth doing. Because there, on a 20-inch screen looking better than expected, was my past. Not all of it, but a big chunk of it. My old house. My old neighborhood. My neighbors. My friends. My dog, Buttons. My Aunt Lorraine. And both my parents, so incredibly young.
My father bought a 35 millimeter slide camera in the summer of 1957 and for a year he and that camera were inseparable. Eventually, he took it out just for occasions. Holidays and birthdays. School dances. Proms, graduations, my wedding. The birth of my son. My father chronicled decades.
He finally bought himself a big metal projection screen sometime in the 1960s but for most of my childhood, when he wanted to show his slides, he tacked a white sheet to the parlor wall. Because this was a makeshift screen, the images wavered, the pictures were creased, and more often than not the flowered wallpaper showed through.
High-Tech Images
The photos on my computer screen do not waver. Some are flecked with dust and some are a little out of focus and most are a strange shade of orange, but they look better to me than they looked 50 years ago.
I study every one. I inspect the background — the trees my father planted, tiny in some pictures, huge in others, the white lattice trellis he built, the two weeping willows that a hurricane blew away, the rock garden my mother loved, the neighbors' fences, the neighbors' bare backyards.
It's the neighborhood that pulls me back, the place I called home from the time I was 7 until I left to get married. My house. My street. The life I lived and the life I left there.
I make a file and call it "neighborhood." Easy to do, just click on the image and drag it into the file and there it is. And when I finish clicking and dragging, I have the option to add a song. So I do. And I have my first slideshow.
My father would be proud.
Onscreen Enchantment
I show my grandson, Adam, when he comes to visit. "Want to see what I did?" I ask and because he is 5, he doesn’t hesitate.
"That's the house I lived in when I was just a little older than you," I tell him. "And that's my friend Elaine. And that's my friend Rosemary. And that’s my dog, Buttons. And all those people? Those are my neighbors who came over to see me and take pictures the night of my senior prom."
It is a short slideshow, just two minutes, and when it is finished Adam says, "I love it, Mimi" and asks if he can make a slideshow.
"Of course," I say, because that's what you say to your grandchildren. "What do you want it to be about? Your neighborhood? Mom? Or Dad? Or Charlotte? Or your friends? We can do anything you want."
And he says, "I want to make a movie about Lucy and me."
Lucy is his 6-year-old cousin and in the beginning it was just the two of them, Lucy and Adam, only ten months apart, always together, at my house, at their houses, in a playpen, in the living room, in a double stroller, inseparable. I have hundreds of photos of Lucy and Adam on my computer. We look through them, then Adam clicks on the ones he wants.
We make a file. We call it Lucy and Adam. He moves around the pictures until he has them in an order he likes. Then he deletes some. Then he chooses a Beatles song, "From Me to You."
Lights, Camera, Action
We press play.
And there on the computer screen is Adam's first movie.
It's a long, long way from a sheet on a wall to this. And yet, though the technology is different, the images crisper, the process easier, the moment is the same.
My grandson and I are sitting side by side watching people we love on a screen. His mother returns to pick him up. She sits with us. She smiles. My other daughter stops by with Lucy. Then my husband comes home. Then Lucy's dad.
We add more chairs and play the movie again and again.
Home
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