Old Photos

When I was in nursing school I did a summer internship in New Mexico where I shared an old trailer with another nursing and medical student. On the weekends we toured around the state of New Mexico and Artie, the Penn State med student, led these tours. He had been in New Mexico for much longer than we so he took us to places he thought we should experience. His tours were peppered and laced with personal experiences, such as “this is where I had to pee so bad I thought my bladder would burst” or “this is where I got a taco and had diarrhea for a month”. Seeing New Mexico from Artie’s point of view was very much packaged with his activities of survival and daily living.

We often share events of our lives based on the emotions of those personal experiences. If you listen to someone who returns from Paris, for example, the tales and photos are usually laced with emotional highs and lows. The photos become backdrops to those emotional experiences. Likewise, when you pull out old photos, the ones you are drawn to will be the ones you remember something going on that helped create some kind of memory now seared in your heart and mind. You will automatically remark, "Oh, I remember that photo! We were pretending to be a happy family all wearing the same outfit and Meg pinched Mark right before the photo. You can see that devilish smirk on her face.” Or maybe “I remember this! I had just found out I was pregnant and I was trying to not throw up. I was trying to hold my cookies smiling bravely and right after the click, I threw up on your dad.”

Tours, vacations, and old photos seem to be able to carry the emotion of the experience along with that frozen moment in time. The emotions of the time can become embedded into the photo, the tour, or the event because it is the emotion and drama of the moment seems to act almost as if it is a type of glue that secures it within our brain.

As I peruse through old photos of my parents, I recognize that many of these old photos have stories that I never heard. They will probably be forever silent and remain in a drawer because I have no connection to the photograph. Some of them feel empty to me but some trigger a desire to want more. Why was this photo taken? When was it taken, where, and who is in that photo? It is as if I found a mysterious novel and am reading chapter 1 and then find out chapter 2 is missing.

It is the photos that carry an emotion, or a drama, or have become imprinted with a certain feeling that helps it create a memory. It is often those kinds of photos that help us tell our stories and create little chapters about our life.

Old Photo that leaves me wanting more. Who is the one in the red cap? Where was this taken and why is the car in the ditch? Is that dad's old 1948 Ford truck with a rope pulling out the car? What happened next?

Old Photos