My Family, Circa 1980

This is my new favorite picture:

I believe it's from around 1980. I know for sure it was taken at my grandmother's house in Tucker; that's her chair my dad's sitting in.

What I love so much about seeing these old pictures, apart from seeing myself and my brother and parents from so many years ago (Dad was only about 35 in this picture, twelve years younger than I am now!), is seeing the surroundings that at the time I took for granted but which now I look back on with great nostalgia. The built-in bookcases on the left of the picture; the stacking containers on the shelf just to the left of Dad; the skeins of yarn on the shelf in the background, just to the left of my head; the basket with more yarn on the floor, to the right of Mom; those thin, homemade books stacked on the shelf just behind Jeff, which I know contained my grandmother's poems and stories; the pole lamp with those elaborate globes; the small grandfather clock behind me; the oil lamp on the top shelf, and the pictures of Delores and Wayne beside it; the wood paneling of the room; the green linoleum floor...

I miss it all so much. The people in the pictures are most important, of course, but it all matters, every bit of it. Each skein of yarn is precious, now, more than three decades later.

Christmas Day 1973, Tucker, Georgia: For Sharon

When I think about happy times and happy places, this is a perfect distillation of what I see--not just this day, but any day when all of us cousins gathered together in that red-brick house, surrounded by our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, with the swing set and playhouse in the back, and the apple trees to climb, and the metal storage building where Pa kept his riding lawn mower out back, and the train set in the attic, and running and laughing and arguing and yelling and eating, and sometimes TV, and not wanting to go home at the end of the day.

It was so wonderful to be young, and to have siblings and cousins to share it with, and an abundance of grown-ups who loved us.

I wish we could go back and do it all over again. I wouldn't change a thing.

* * *

Very early this morning my cousin Sharon, topmost in the picture above, left us after a year-long battle with a rare form of brain cancer.

I can't believe she's gone.

How can it have been forty years already since this picture was taken? How can it go by so quickly?

Goodbye, Sharon. I'm grateful we had so many times like the one shown above. I'm so sorry you had to leave so early.

Apple II Memories

I got my first computer around 1979, an Apple II that hooked up to a TV set via an RF converter, and whose character set didn't include lower case letters. In the early 1980s I spent thousands of hours playing adventure and fantasy games; my favorite of all time was Wizardry, in which my brother Jeff, my cousin Scott, and I spent hours and hours building up our party of adventurers--Imok, Srizaxa, Sribob, and the rest.

*Sigh* It's been thirty years now, but tonight I recaptured a little of that long-gone magic when I downloaded an Apple II emulator for my Windows-based PC, and spent the better part of the last two hours playing--not Wizardry; that's too involved, and it wouldn't feel right without Jeff and Scott--but Montezuma's Revenge, another favorite from that era.

Retrospection and Introspection

Here's me, back in 2002:

In this picture I am ten years younger than I am now, forty pounds lighter, and have very little discernible gray in my hair or beard. Anna and I had been married only a year, and we were still five years away from having our first child. I was only thirty-five, older than many newly-married men, true, but still young by many standards.

When I look back on pictures like this, I often think, "Wow, I wish I had realized then how wonderful my life really was. I should have appreciated it more at the time. I should not have taken it so much for granted."

And then I realize: My life today contains so many moments that someday I will look back on and realize were wonderful. Among the best things I can do for my wife, for my children, for myself, then, is to try and appreciate how wonderful my life is right now, while it's actually going on, to not take it for granted but to know it for the gift that it is.

I am blessed. But then, we all are.

Twenty Years of Me

Here's a brief glimpse of how I've changed over the years.

First, here I am in 1989:

(picture by Margarette Rogers)

I was nearing the end of college--my undergraduate degree, anyway; I didn't know it at the time, but I would keep going back for sixteen more years until I eventually earned two master's degrees. I cut most of that mass of hair off just a few months later, though frankly I miss it sometimes. I liked having long hair.

Now, fast forward ten years to 1999:

(picture by Heather Dobson)

I'd had a beard for most of the previous ten years--though as you can see in the picture from 1989, it was a little sparse when I was younger--but I shaved it off near the end of 1998, and kept it off through half of 1999. (I haven't been beardless since.) This is how I looked when Anna and I met right in the middle of 1999, though by the time of our first date on August 11, I'd grown my beard back. I gave up the contact lenses not too much later, when my astigmatism reached a point where contacts didn't work very well for me. Besides, I look better with glasses anyway.

And here I am, about a year and a half ago, in the middle of 2009:

By this point, I was a full-time stay-at-home dad of one, and a part-time college English instructor. Not a whole lot has changed since this picture was taken, except that now I'm a father of two, and I have even more gray in my hair and beard.

As I write this, I am just three months away from turning 44, twice the age I was in the first picture above. Sometimes I miss the person I was in 1989, half a lifetime ago. You give up things as you get older, like the notion that you've got in you a string of great novels just waiting to come out, or the idea that someday you'll be a well-respected professor at a prestigious university. But after a while, you realize--or, at least, I realized--that it's okay to reach middle age without having published a book, there's still time. And the people teaching at prestigious universities are so busy with grading their students' work and reading the Important Books that they're s'pose to read that they don't have the luxury of reading cool science fiction and fantasy novels (especially the ones with covers by Darrell K. Sweet), lots of Ray Bradbury stories, and books about Zen Buddhism.

So in every way that really counts, I'm better off now, certainly happier, than I ever have been.

[I originally wrote this post for the family blog, Planet Burdett, and then copied it here ten years later, retaining the original date.]