Our House in Lilburn in Snow, circa 1980

As I write this, we are in the midst of a heat wave, with temperatures all around the country approaching, in many places exceeding, one-hundred degrees. This picture is a reminder that it hasn't always been hot; sometimes, in fact, despite what Elyse believes, it even snows here in Georgia.

This is our house and front yard in Lilburn covered in snow. I'm not sure exactly when this picture was made, but it looks like probably the late 1970s or the early 1980s; I'm going to call it 1980. The car you can see most clearly in the carport is our 1978 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, and I'm pretty sure the car beside it is our 1977 Toyota Corolla; we had both of those cars, but not yet Dad's company car, the Cadillac, by 1980.

There's a pair of tracks in the picture, very near the bottom of the frame, in what would have been our neighbors' yard. They're very regular tracks, like a car's tire tracks, though I of course have no idea if they were made by a car or not. Our neighbors were the Winterses: Beverly, the divorced (I think) mother of two boys, Jeff and Kevin, who were enough older than me that we never went to the same school, but not so much older that they were already out of school when I started school. I found what I think is the mother's obituary online; if it is her, she also had an older son, Alan, of whom I have no memory; he may have already left the nest (as it were) by the time I became aware of the family next door. In any case, she, Beverly, lived until a little over two years ago. I have no idea when she moved away from Lilburn.

There's also visible in this picture a figure walking by the car. At least, that's what I think it is; it's hard to tell. It might even be me!

Mom and Dad and Tommy and Kathy in Tommy and Kathy's Kitchen Having Dinner, 1987

I wasn't there that night, but I know this kitchen well. I had many a Christmas Eve dinner there in the 1970s and early 1980s, all many years before this picture was taken in the late '80s.

According to the timestamp on the picture, which I have cropped off in the version posted here (as I have cropped off the dog, at which Mom was looking when the shutter was snapped), this photograph was made a couple of days after Dad's birthday that year – 1987, when he turned forty-three. What we see here, then, is, I'm pretty sure, a Birthday Dinner; probably that year Dad's birthday fell on a weeknight or some night when Mom and Dad or Tommy and Kathy had other plans, so they celebrated my dad's birthday shortly after his actual birthday.

I'm not sure who took the picture, but there is in the picture some evidence of that person's presence: five chairs at the table, though only four people sit at it; five glasses of tea on the table; five plates; etc. Someone clearly rose, camera in hand, and recorded the night for posterity, as they recorded a few other scenes from that night, but I don't know who that camera-wielding person was.

Other things I don't know: Where I was, or Jeff, or my cousin Rick, that night. However, I do know this: By then we were all teenagers and surely not interested in having dinner with our parents, and too old to be made to do so.

This photograph was made twenty years before Tommy's passing in his late 50s. The house is no longer in the family, but it's still standing, and I drive by it periodically and marvel at how much it's changed. (That's true, actually, of a great many places.) I would love to see the inside of it, to see how much it's changed; I believe that the company that bought the property uses the house as an office, and I doubt it's changed dramatically, the living room and bedrooms making good offices as they were. I have great memories of going there and seeing Tommy and Kathy and playing with Ric. It is one of the important places of my youth, and I treasure the memory of it.

Me and Spike, 1973; Me and Pookie, 1978

I'm not really what you'd call a dog person.

Not that you have to buy into the artificial binary of "dog people" and "cat people." I've known plenty of people who love both, perhaps even have one (or more!) of each as a companion. And some people don't like either; it's weird, they say, to let an animal have free reign in your home and even sleep in your bed. Sometimes I see it that way myself.

But most of the time, I'm a cat person.

Not in the Val Lewton sense, of course, but if I am going to give an animal free reign in my home and let it sleep in the bed with me, I would much prefer it be a cat than a dog. In fact, Anna and the kids and I do have three cats, all of whom do have free reign in our home and sometimes do sleep in the bed with us (until they get kicked out of the bedroom for pouncing on people who are trying to sleep), and zero dogs. Before we had kids, Anna and I had six cats (yes, all at the same time). We've never had any dogs, and don't intend to get any anytime soon.

However, I must say that a dog was a great pet to have for a little boy.

The first picture is me and my first dog, Spike, probably in about 1973 before I'd even started first grade. I didn't have Spike for long – as I remember it, the backyard of our house in Lilburn wasn't fenced in, and he just had that small corner to live in (you can't see it in this picture, but Dad built a little lumber and chicken-wire pen for him), and he got wild and unmanageable as he got older, and eventually Dad took him to the pound.

Pookie, the dog you see in the second picture, came to live with us shortly after that. We had the yard fenced in, and Pookie was my constant companion for the next…well, many years, until I lost interest in dogs and got more interested in guitars and science fiction and the other things that can sometimes pull a boy away from his dog. Nonetheless, as I remember it, Pookie was with us until after I graduated from college, more than sixteen years. I've never had another dog, but I have had lots of cats.

So, though I may now be a committed cat person, I started life as a dog person, which is just how I think it was supposed to be. Pookie was a great dog and, even if I don't want a dog in my life now, I'm glad I got to grow up with him.

Two views of me in a suit

These pictures weren't made that far apart, really. There's probably nineteen or twenty years between the two – and that's nothing these days. Nineteen or twenty years ago seems like yesterday to me now, but the nineteen- or twenty-year span shown here is much more significant. Going in age from five to twenty-four is a pretty large and significant leap.

I don't know the occasion of the first picture, the one of me at four or five looking very dapper (but a tad nervous), and I don't recognize or remember that suit. I suspect the picture was taken on a Sunday and I wore the suit to church; maybe it was Easter – though that usually called for a more colorful outfit – or maybe it was the day I was baptized. Or maybe the occasion was a wedding I have now forgotten; I'm not sure I ever actually went to a wedding when I was that young, but if I did, I would have worn a suit.

I'm not sure about the occasion of the second picture, either, but I recognize the suit – it was my "interview suit," which I bought especially for job interviews after I graduated from college. I also wore it to…well, anything I went to where a suit was appropriate: holiday parties, weddings (did I go to any back then?), funerals, etc. However, in the full, uncropped version of this picture, you can see that the house is decorated for Christmas, so I suspect I was dressed up for the ExecuTrain holiday party, probably in 1990 or 1991.

Today I don't even own a suit. If I were invited to a wedding I would have to go out and buy something to wear.

Me and Dad on My Birthday, 1978

I can't say for sure that this was my birthday, or indeed anyone's birthday. Maybe it was just some random day during my childhood when we had cake. With candles. And I got to blow out the candles.

Okay, I'm pretty sure this picture was taken on my birthday.

I'm also pretty sure it was taken in 1978 because of the shirt I'm wearing. I wrote about this in another musing; I got that shirt for Christmas when I was in fifth grade (which would have been in 1977), and my best friend Bobby Py got an identical shirt, and we spent the rest of the school year (until he moved away, anyway, in my memory near the end of the school year) trying to coordinate us wearing the same shirt to school on the same day. I don't think we ever managed it; I think the only day that both of us wore that shirt to school on the same day was sometime in January, when we both realized we had gotten the same shirt for Christmas.

So this picture was probably taken on or around my birthday in April of 1978, just a few months after Christmas of 1977.

Speaking of shirts, which I was just a few words ago, I also remember the shirt that Dad's wearing. I think he wore that shirt often. In fact, though this is probably not accurate, right now as I type this I picture him in that shirt in nearly every photograph we have from the 1970's or '80's. (Several hours later, I just looked through all of my scanned pictures in search of another picture of Dad wearing this shirt, and came up with nothing.)

But enough about shirts; now let's look at the house, and at us. In this picture, we are in the kitchen of our house in Lilburn, where at this point we had lived for five years, sitting at the table (which was round), right in front of the double folding doors that hid our washer and dryer (and I think also the water heater). Right behind us, visible between our heads, are some shirts that had come out of the dryer and been put on hangers and hung up (so as not to wrinkle, I imagine), but not yet put away to whatever closets they belonged in.

Dad is holding a book of matches, and is only 33 years old in this picture – more than 20 years younger than I am now. Mom, who is probably taking this picture, and who probably made the cake and hung up the shirts, but who is not otherwise seen in this picture, was 31 at the time. I don't know where Jeff was; he would have been eight then.

Three Views of a Christmas Morning

Some of my memories of my childhood are not actual memories of my childhood – they are an awareness of what's in the pictures Mom took of my childhood. And, as I think I've written before, I am grateful that Mom took so many pictures while I was growing up, and that we still have them all. (In fairness to Dad, I must say that probably a few of the pictures we have were actually taken by him, such as any picture that has Mom in it, but I'm pretty sure the majority of our family photos were taken by Mom.)

So I'm glad to have these pictures of Christmas morning fifty years ago, even though I think I do have actual (albeit vague) memories of this day. I don't remember the blue housecoat I'm wearing in the picture at the top, but I do remember the feeling of relief and joy upon finally being allowed -- after being up and waiting in suspense in my room probably half of the night, if not all of it -- into the den, the room in which Santa Claus laid out our presents, to find a veritable treasure trove of goodness. I even remember some of the things that Santa Claus laid out in that corner of the den. In fact, I still have the sleeping bag that's forming a square on the floor in the picture on top, which you probably can't tell from this picture has Winnie-the-Pooh characters on it. I used it for years, and now it sits rolled up in my closet, ripped in several places, much of its stuffing coming out.

Sitting atop the Winnie-the-Pooh sleeping bag in the picture is a box containing a toy pistol and a holster – yes, it was a different time back then, when people gave realistic-looking toy guns to children to play with, some of them cap guns that made a realistic shot sound, and then turned those children loose to play Cops and Robbers or Cowboys and Indians, both of which required the kid lucky enough to have the pistol and holster around his waist to shoot his friends, punctuating each pretend shot with a shout of "Bang!" (unless you had a cap gun to do the "Bang!" for you), and the kids that were hit by those imaginary bullets knew it was their job to tumble to the ground and play dead, and to stay dead until they came back to life and it was their turn to do the shooting.

I kind of hope kids don't play like that anymore, but I also mourn the passing of that kind of mixed innocence and worldliness. And, man, I wanted to be a cowboy so bad! I know now that my fantasies about being a cowboy featured a lot fewer cows and a lot more guns than the real thing, I know that now, but I also mourn the passing of the cowboy as an iconic part of childhood.

And trains, like cowboys, don't seem to be as much a part of the current cultural landscape as they used to be. Fifty years ago, though, they were a pretty significant part of childhood, as evidenced by the second picture above, in which Jeff sits both surrounded by toys and in the middle of a circle of toy train track – some of which I believe I still have. I might even have the engine shown in the picture; I'm not sure how much of what I have in a box in the garage is in this picture.

The top picture shows Dad, then only about twenty-eight years old (half my current age!), sitting at our dining room table and playing with a shooting gallery game. You can also see a small (I'm tempted to say tiny) pool table game in the picture, and just barely visible on the right side of the frame is Jeff in his bright red pajamas. On the wall beside Dad is the matador decoration, which was accompanied by a charging bull decoration. I remember that matador well, and also, I think, a painting of a conquistador, and a mounted metal pseudo-sword (not sharp) and mace (not removable from its mounting board) adorning the walls. For a long time, whenever I heard the Procol Harum song "Conquistador," I thought of those wall decorations in our den when I was young.

But enough about Procol Harum, back to the pictures: I vaguely remember the shooting game Dad's playing, don't remember the pool-table game at all, but I remember well the camper/RV (for Little People? Weebles? That detail I don't recall.) you can see in the middle picture, and also the one near it that I think was a Little People airport.

How wonderful it was to be young and innocent and to live in such a time and place at Christmas!

Sharon and Jeff, 1972

As of just a few days ago, it's been nine years – nine years; almost a decade! – since my cousin Sharon (in this picture from half a century ago only about nine years old herself) departed this plane of existence for the afterlife after a year-long battle with brain cancer.

It's hard to believe Sharon's been gone for that long, but in a way it's also hard to believe that there once was a 1972, when Sharon was only nine (or ten, depending on when this picture was taken) and my brother Jeff (shown here cutely wearing Sharon's sandal) was still in diapers.

I don't know the story behind this picture, beyond the obvious: Sharon put her sandal on Jeff, which Mom thought was cute so she took a picture of it. There are pillows, bed pillows, on the sofa behind them; had someone spent the night with us? Had Danelle come over to visit Mom and brought her kids? (At this point, Danelle had only two kids, Sharon and Catherine; Heather hadn't yet been born.) Were Catherine and I down in the basement playing, as I remember doing often when she came over?

This would have been our house in Clarkston, shortly before we moved briefly to Maryland for Dad's job and then returned, nine months later, not happy being so far away from family and friends and the part of the world we (or at least Mom and Dad) knew and felt comfortable in, and moved into the house in Lilburn.