Sometimes the ghosts you think are from the past inform you they are very much part of your present and maybe even your future too.
You can close your eyes or turn your head but it doesn’t matter because they will find your eyes and force you to look upon their gaze.
Then again if you go through drawers and boxes filled with the two generations of men before you there is a good chance something in there will give you a ride between then and now.
Call it an on ramp to the freeway of memories, thoughts and ideas.
When I hit it on Thursday I didn’t realize how distracted I was or how far I fell into the rabbit hole until I got a look at some of the pictures I took and the things I didn’t do.
If I had I probably would have retaken the short of my paternal grandparents so that it wasn’t draped in shadows but didn’t. But it gave me a bunch of ideas and bloggers love ideas for content and coding.
Once They Were Young Too
The picture is in an album that has such a hold upon it I didn’t dare try to remove it for fear of it tearing so I couldn’t check the flip side for the date.
But I am fairly certain I was told it was taken somewhere around the time my grandparents were married or before my Dad was born so I know they are between 27 and 29.
I know the U.S. has already entered World War II and that my grandfather is in the service for the second time but I don’t know what kind of feelings they had about the future. No idea about what sort of hope, dreams and plans they had other than the routine ones you might expect a young couple to have.
Can’t say whether this is before or after grandpa asked to go to Europe or how grandma felt about it all. Got my ideas and figure if there was a time I could have used grandpa’s line about not being able to screw an old head on young shoulders upon him it would have been then.
I was still invincible at 29 so I imagine he was too.
My middle sister, mom and I looked at the picture of my dad and grandpa above and almost did a double take because there are pictures of me that look so much like he did there.
But there is one big difference, they both had blue eyes and I don’t, not that it matters in black and white picture.
Can’t say that I see much of a resemblance with grandpa because he had reddish hair when he was younger. Dad and I had bigger frames, were taller and had a darker complexion.
Still I look at grandpa and think about how I became a father at roughly the same age as he did and wonder what that was like for him.
We discussed it a little bit, but when it happened for me it was really hard for me to imagine him having been that young. Maybe more than 21 years of parenting has helped my imagination because now when I look at his picture I see the younger man.
And my father, well I keep looking at his eyes and his overall expression because I recognize it and I wonder how much of our personality comes into the world with us and how much is formed by experience.
Cruising Down The Years
Fast forward fifty some years later and you get another father and son shot except you only get 20 year-old Josh’s face and his father’s hand.
It’s a family trip to Orlando, one of the last we took when there was just the six of us, no husbands, wives or grandchildren.
Won’t be too long before I’ll be hitting some bars with friends who are shipping out to Iraq for the first Gulf War.
Won’t be too long before I’ll switch majors and starting working at the college newspaper and begin the path that leads to the blog you are reading today.
I could tell you about some of the dreams I had then and some of the ideas about what the future held for me. Can tell you about what came true, what didn’t and what still might.
I can also tell you 15 different things that happened that I never ever anticipated and about how sometimes I have thought about choices made back then that led to now.
But what strikes me today is the memory of what it once took to layout a paper. The paste-up and Xacto knives that preceded software that we used to lay out the paper and how I dreamed of a time when making corrections was simple.
Given the time I put in today wrestling with the code on several different blogs in an effort to make them load faster and to become more reader friendly it almost took me back because some things are still kind of clunky.
Like they say on Joshua Tree:
I’ll show you a place
High on the desert plain, yeah
Where the streets have no name, oh, oh
Unpacked most of my stuff last night and finished the last few things this morning feeling a mix of relief and frustration.
Took out the calendar and a notebook and started mapping out a plan for the future because I have things to do and some of them can’t be done solely through force of will and desire.
Some require a different touch and hands on time just like fixing the broken parts and pieces of the blogs do. And I know I didn’t get to everything, but I got to quite a bit.
Meanwhile the ghosts I stirred up didn’t slip back into the past which tells me there are some things that must be handled now so they can return to their slumber.
I still haven’t found all that I am looking for, but you can’t blame that solely upon the unforgettable fire.
All I want is still possible, or most of it.
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