Photo by Merlina McGovern
This isn’t some larger question about our collective past. Although I’m interested in history, I’m not a historian. No, I’m talking about our personal histories.
I’m part of the often forgotten Gen X. We’re not locked in battle like Gen Z and Millenials. And our generation hasn’t been turned into an insult like the Baby Boomers. We’re the generation of slackers and people that would sell their souls rather than sell out. My memories are captured by old color photographs that seem so low definition compared to the HD lives that we’re all living now.
My parents had a clunky video camera, but none of the tapes that they may have made in the past have survived. My sister and I used to record silly radio skits on blank music cassettes, all lost to the unforgiving and insistent march of technology and time. My foggy old brain doesn’t remember what those old skits were about, but I do remember the belly laughs that ensued as we said very clever things like “And that’s it for the 10 o’clock news at 8.”
I decided to fish out an old photograph from a photo album, where the photos are not being fed into an AI so they can be sorted into categories. No, the photos are just hanging out in little plastic sleeves against slightly tacky backing that’s most likely not acid free, seeing as how the photos all seemed to have slightly yellowed with age.
This particular photo has me awash in memories and questions. My sister (who I lost to cancer thirteen years ago) and I are sitting with our pet dog, Thunder, on a South Padre Island beach. I remember that my mom renamed our keeshond Thunder because she couldn’t pronounce the original name my sister and I had given him: Albus Dumbledore. I also remember being shocked that people could drive their cars right up to the waves, which was shocking to this California gal.
I have to ask why the heck was I wearing what look to be heavy hiking boots at the beach? And why did the person taking our picture place us so far off to the left? It might have been my dad, in which case, were were lucky that he didn’t cut our heads off in the photo.
We both look a little subdued. Probably because we were still getting used to my parents uprooting the family to move to south Texas after spending years of our life in Southern California. Here, we would get to know my dad’s large extended latino family, including an aunt who had a couple of cows in her back yard. I remember evening talks outside under a covered carport, while my dad sipped beers, and we all hoped that the winds didn’t waft the smell of a nearby cattle farm our way.
In the summers, it was so hot that the wayward students at the nearby Marine Military Academy that my dad worked for couldn’t go outside for their daily PT.
My cousins would take us to dance at the raucous spring break bars, full of test tube tequila shots and sticky floors. I learned how to dance the cumbia when we lived there.
I think of all those memories we made, and I look at that picture. It’s something that I should do more often. Remembering the past, with the fun and joy and laughter. It helps me to paint a picture of that time that isn’t just painted with the black and gray and white of grief.
I wonder what my daughter will do to look back at her memories, so many of them being now documented digitally or captured and then floating away like dandelion seeds in the wind on apps like Snapchat.
How do you remember your past?