This weekend, Aaron and I spent an afternoon with his Dad and brother. We went out to lunch, then spent a few hours just talking at their Dad’s house.
Of course, me being such a sucker for photos, and being curious about Aaron’s family, I started off the requisite photo album viewing by declaring, “I want to see pictures of Fat Grammie!” (Referring, of course, to the brief period of time in the early 1970s when Aaron’s grandmother was quite overweight. She went on Weight Watchers and lost it all, and kept it off over the years.)
We ended up looking though nearly a dozen photo albums from the late ’60s and the ’70s, and I got to see not only Fat Grammie, but Poppa with a beard, and Baby Aaron at two weeks — and Aaron’s mother, who passed away just about five years before I met him. I kept being amazed by the people and places I was seeing in these photos — “Wow, you really do look like your mother,” and, “Is that the same rocking chair that’s still at Grammie and Poppa’s house?” and just looking over toward the kitchen to be sure that the linoleum in that photo from 1978 is really the same linoleum that’s still there today.
It wasn’t until then that I realized why I have such an obsession with photos, and candid, unposed shots in particular.
They’re a time capsule.
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