Me and Mom in the Kitchen, Lilburn, Georgia, ca. 1981

We’re both wearing blue, and neither of us looks all that happy. Not unhappy, just…normal, average, the way most of us look most of the time. We were just living our lives, starting our day (whatever random day that happened to be), getting our breakfast together—in front of me is a plate of pancakes, and also a bottle of syrup, the same kind I use today, I think; in the background, on the left edge of the frame about halfway down, you can see that there’s still some coffee in the coffee pot.

This picture shows an everyday scene of such mundanity that I doubt most people would think it worth pointing a camera at, especially back then, before digital cameras and smartphones with built-in cameras, when film had to be purchased, and then you had to pay to have it developed after you’d used it. I’m not sure why Dad took this picture--I’m pretty sure it was my father who took it; who else could it have been? Maybe it actually was a special day, though I can't find here any clues as to what that might have been (a birthday? Easter? the first or last day of school?). Maybe Dad was testing a new camera, or using up the last exposure on a roll of film so he could take it to be developed. Maybe he did it just to annoy Mom.

Whatever the impetus for this picture’s existence, I’m glad I have it. It offers a glimpse into my youth I treasure. I'm pretty sure that at the moment this picture was taken, Mom and I were mostly taking that moment for granted. I had, I’m quite sure, no idea I would someday look at this scene and be happy to revisit it. I’m sure I just wanted to eat my pancakes. I hope I enjoyed them.

What I hope even more, though, is that it would have occurred to me, at least every once in a while, to be grateful I had a mother who would make me pancakes, and who on other days made French toast, or creamed chipped beef on toast (sometimes without the beef), or bacon and eggs, or any one of a whole host of other breakfasts she regularly made for us. I am grateful now for all of that.

And though I'm sure it would have been surprising news at the time to say that that kitchen would ever be an object of appreciation, all these years later I have a great deal of affection for it--linoleum floor, tacky wallpaper, and all. On the counter, in front of the syrup, is a little container Mom used to screw on to our blender to make...what? I have no idea. And behind me, just at my left elbow, you can see the red bun warmer that we had for years. Above that, just under the vent hood--where some years later a microwave oven would go--hangs an assortment of spatulas and ladles and strainers. And, as I pointed out earlier, on the left edge of the frame you can just make out the coffee maker. Mr. Coffee? Maybe. We had one at one point, but I don't remember what we had then. Proctor Silex? Hamilton Beach? Perhaps. Maybe it doesn't matter.

But in a way, it does matter. These little details, in their very ordinariness, their everydayness, are among the things I love to see when I look back at these old pictures. Most of them are pretty mundane, with nothing special about them, but put together enough ordinary little details and they just might add up to a whole past.

Remember what Emily asks the State Manager near the end of Our Town? "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?" The answer, of course, is "No."

Maybe one of the reasons I love looking back on these kinds of pictures is because they help me realize life, even if what the picture shows happened thirty-five years ago. In one of her short stories, Amy Hempel writes something like, "looking back shows us more than looking at." Sometimes looking back is good enough. If you realize life in retrospect, that still counts.

Chris and Jeff Rocking Out in Jeff's Bedroom, Lilburn, GA, 1980

Jeff’s wearing a Star Trek T-shirt and mine says Star Wars, but there was no rivalry between those two science fiction universes back in late 1979 or early 1980 when this picture was taken. One was an old TV show that had been off the air for more than a decade, the other was a fairly recent, wildly popular movie—but just a movie, singular, and not a whole franchise, or, for some people, a way of life. (By the time this picture was taken, Star Trek: The Motion Picture may have been released, but it wasn’t very good so I don’t think it counts. Also, I don’t think The Empire Strikes Back had come out yet, and besides, Star Wars is the only real Star Wars, as far as I’m concerned.)

“Star Trek” and Star Wars aren’t the only science fiction represented in this photograph: on the top left you can see a Shogun Warrior, whose fists (if I remember correctly) could be shot from his arms like missiles at the press of a hidden button, and who probably had other weapons as well. On the shelf directly below that is a space vehicle of some kind from the Micronauts line.

At one point Jeff and I had quite a collection of Shogun Warriors and Micronauts. Among my many wonderful memories of childhood are the times when we could convince my mother to take us to Lionel Playworld, which was on Buford Highway in Doraville (though I may not have known either of those facts at the time), and which was (as far as I was concerned) the greatest toy store in the world. I can’t recall how much was actually bought when we would go; I think we had maybe ten dollars each saved—though in the late 1970s, ten dollars was a lot—and we could buy one or two things. Just being in Lionel Playworld was enough, even if I didn’t get to buy everything that caught my eye. We did eventually amass quite a collection, as I said, but most of the toys we had we got for Christmas or our birthdays.

Of course, most people might not even notice the Shogun Warrior and the Micronaut. The focus of the picture is me and Jeff in all our youthful, untrained musical glory. I got the guitar for Christmas just a few months (or maybe even weeks, or days) before this picture was taken. It was a black Memphis Les Paul copy, which had a mostly hollow body that was badly prone to microphonics. My amp, which isn’t in this picture (or in Jeff’s room at all), was a twenty-watt Crate amp.

This wasn’t originally the guitar I was going to get; Dad had an Explorer copy on layaway at Joe’s Music in Norcross, but I changed my mind at some point and decided I wanted the Les Paul. Though it’s been nearly forty years, I sometimes think about that and wish I’d gotten the Explorer.

The drums may have been more my idea than Jeff’s, I don’t know. I was eager to put together a band, and figured the guy in the bedroom right next to mine was a good candidate for the drums. How interested he really was, apart from a level of enthusiasm than an older brother can sometimes inspire, I don’t know, but he never really learned to play those toy drums. At one point, a year or two later, I somehow managed to get him outfitted with a bass, but we never really coalesced into a band. (Interestingly, it was that instrument, a cheap copy of a Fender Telecaster bass, that my cousin Scott played when he and I were in the band with Roy, so I did, in a manner of speaking, achieve my end.)

It took me a few years, but I finally realized that I don’t actually have any musical talent. Not enough, anyway, to become the working musician I once aspired to be, and definitely not enough to even approach the skill of the guitarists who were (or would become, in the months and years after this picture was taken) my idols: Steve Howe, Steve Morse, and especially Alex Lifeson. Within five or six years of this picture being taken, Jeff would become a much better guitar player than I was.

But this picture doesn’t remind me of lost dreams or a lack of talent—though I will admit that those are things I still occasionally struggle with. This picture reminds me of how great it was to be young and to have hopes and aspirations, and to have a brother you could try to rope into being involved in them, and, perhaps most important of all, how fortunate I was to have a mother who would put up with all the noise coming out of my bedroom (small though it was, that Crate amp I had could really wail), and who could macramé a lion for your brother’s bedroom wall, and take you to Lionel Playworld so you could dream of one day owning the entire collection of both Shogun Warriors and Micronauts.

Notes from a Midlife Crisis

When Socrates insisted that "the unexamined life is not worth living," most people agree that he was encouraging us to examine our interior lives, the ideas and beliefs and motivations and choices and reactions that propel us through the world. Ever since I turned 50 a few months ago, however, I've been equally interested in doing some exterior examination: How have I changed over the years? Do the physical changes I've gone through in the last few decades--the added pounds, the new wrinkles, the ever-multiplying gray hairs and slowly-receding hair line (and, if I'm really honest, the additional chins...*sigh*)--say anything about the interior changes that I've also experienced?

Yeah, probably. I don't know. Maybe.

But there's one thing I can say: My hair has changed quite a bit over the years, but my hair style hasn't changed at all. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, indeed.

The above picture is me from sometime around 1977 until July of 2017, approximately every thirteen or fourteen years. Maybe one of the reasons looking back on my life like this is valuable is because, seeing myself at ten, at twenty-three, at thirty-eight, I can remember many wonderful things from my life at those times, and, if I'm smart (and that's a big if!), it prompts me to count all the wonderful things there are in my life right now, even if I am (gulp!) fifty years old. Midlife may not be quite as much fun or as free as childhood, or young adulthood, or not-young-but-still-not-old adulthood, but it's still life, and that's worth a lot.

Also, I find a great deal of pleasure in this Peanuts strip from 1973, drawn when Charles M. Schulz himself was fifty:

For Laura

Six months ago today someone who was very special to me lost her life-long battle with depression. I can't tell you how sorry I am she's gone.

Her name was Laura Travis when I got to know her, but for more than half of her life her name was Laura Caudle. She was only 14 when we met, 15 when this picture was taken, 46 the last time I saw her, and just a few weeks short of her 48th birthday when she died. She is survived by her sister, Kate; her husband of twenty-five years, Keith; her daughter, Lisa; and two grandchildren.

I am grateful that I knew her when I did. She was good for me when I was 16 and 17; it was a great gift to be close to someone who was smart and funny and loved books. It was because of her that I read Stranger in a Strange Land and learned to play backgammon. She helped shape who I am today.

We grew up and went our separate ways, as people do, and stayed only loosely in touch as adults; we both married people who were good for us, and had kids, and led our own lives, and, frankly, probably didn't think about each other all that often. But the world feels emptier without her in it.

Christmas with Charlie McCarthy

I think this picture is from Christmas of 1976. It's clear, I'm sure, why I say it's from Christmas; here's why I peg it specifically to 1976: I was in fourth grade then, and for Christmas that year my best friend Bobby Py and I, by complete coincidence, both got jerseys bearing the number 42. (Was 42 the number of a famous player of the day? I have no idea, and I didn't know then, either. If Bobby knew he never said anything about it.) We spent the second half of that school year trying to orchestrate us wearing our matching shirts on the same day, but I think we only managed it twice.

The star of this picture, of course, is my cousin Scott and his Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist dummy (or "figure," as I believe they prefer to be called). We spent hours and hours playing with Charlie McCarthy, though I don't think either of us got especially adept at ventriloquism. I don't know that we even tried that hard. But playing with puppets of one type or another was part of childhood back then; we also had Bert and Ernie dolls, and Cookie Monster, and perhaps Oscar the Grouch. We would put on shows and charge our parents a dime to watch.

Behind my cousin Catherine, on the left side of the picture, you can see that the lid of the record player is open. I would love to know what record was on the turntable at that point. I would also love to be able to go through my grandmother's collection of records--mostly John Gary, I recall, though I can picture an Irish Rovers album in there too.

The nativity scene on top of the record player; the just-visible artificial tree on the table on the right, decorated with red doves and bows; the red skirt, under the tree--these things, subtle though they are in this photograph, speak to me of joyful Christmas seasons past. Everything else in the photograph--the framed pictures on the wall above the stereo, especially those oval Victorian scenes that I had all but forgotten about; the fern in the corner, fake, I'm pretty sure; the curtains you can just glimpse along the right-hand edge of the frame, which I think were paisley though I didn't know that word at the time—and all that you can't see in the photo, but which I know was there, especially more cousins and parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents—everything else, seen and not seen, speaks to me of year-round joy, and happiness, and reminds me of what a wonderful time it was to be a little boy.

But why, I wonder, was the Santa Claus figure on the floor under Scott's chair?

Chris and Jeff in Pa's Attic with Trains, Tucker, GA, 1975

My grandfather had a train in his attic.

It was a toy electric train, of course, and the track was nailed down to the floorboards in a figure 8, with a span of plastic trestles so the tracks went both over and under themselves, as you can see in the picture. I remember climbing the pull-down metal steps to play with the train with my grandfather--"Pa" to me, the same thing my own children call my father--and being captivated not only by the train, but by the other things that lived there: a pink plastic baby crib (whose headboard you can glimpse in this picture, nestled in the floor joists just behind me and to the left), and my uncle Danny's model airplanes (the kind that really fly), and Christmas decorations (except in December, of course), and countless things I know where there but which, try as I might, I just can't quite picture now. There may have been a permanent light fixture attached to the ceiling joists or rafters somewhere, but the light source I remember was a small lamp with a little decorated glass shade that sat on the floor, and which I turned on by rotating a delicate key-like switch.

Pa had a little bottle of magic solution that could be put into the locomotive's smokestack, a couple of drops at a time, to make the engine really smoke! To an eight-year-old boy in 1975, that was pretty impressive.

Though he died when I was only eleven, I have many memories of my grandfather. I remember having a discussion with him up in that attic about the meanings of words--apparently an interest of mine even when I was very young--in which he explained to me that "a few" was just three or four, but "several" could get "way on up there, seventeen or eighteen." Even though I haven't heard his voice in thirty-seven years, I swear I can hear exactly what he sounded like when he told me this.

Attics have fascinated me for as long as I can remember, and this is why.

Me and My Les Paul, Lilburn Living Room, 1980

I got my first electric guitar in 1979, when I was twelve years old. It was a black Les Paul copy made by a cheap-guitar manufacturer called Memphis, and my parents bought it for me at the now long-defunct (but I suspect sorely missed by a lot of guys from my generation) Joe’s Music in Norcross. I also had a twenty-watt Crate combo amp; it was solid state, but if you turned it up all the way to 10 it produced a decent sounding distortion. Not quite what Pete Townshend got out of his Hiwatt amps, but not bad.

But when I look at this picture, me awkwardly fingering a D chord on a guitar I barely knew how to play is only a small part of what I see, and maybe not even the most important part, now.

Behind me, I see my mother’s Sears typewriter, on which Mom typed my grandmother’s poems and stories from Granny’s longhand drafts on lined notebook paper.

And look on the corner of the desk. There’s a baby portrait and a pair of bronzed baby shoes; my brother’s, I think. Do people still do that? I hope so.

Just above the desk, there are pastel or crayon drawings of my brother and me, which I almost remember sitting for when I was eight or ten.

Farther behind me, on the built-in bookshelves that my Uncle Wayne put in for us sometime in the mid-seventies, there’s a set of 1977 World Book Encyclopedias, and below that, a set of Childcraft encyclopedias. I spent hours poring over those volumes when I was young; perhaps I’m just romanticizing, but I swear they were better than Wikipedia or anything else the Internet has to offer.

And see those top shelves? A couple of bowling trophies that my Dad won in the Ingleside Presbyterian Church bowling league, back when such things existed. On the shelf below the trophies, there are a few books between a pair of sword-through-the-books bookends. I used to think those bookends were the coolest thing. On the shelf below that, there’s a painted clay vase that I made in (I believe) my sixth-grade art class. It's unidentifiable in this picture, but I can see it clearly in my mind.

Beside the bookshelves there’s the fireplace, with a scattering of framed photographs on the mantle. The one on the right--you’d never be able to tell this unless you already knew it--is me in my Cub Scout uniform, circa 1977. On the left edge of the picture, right on the middle of the mantle, is an Olan Mills portrait of me and Jeff. I can’t tell from this picture, but I think in that picture we are wearing matching shirts that my mother made for us.

Every old picture is a treasure trove of sorts.

Addendum: My father posted this comment to the Facebook version of this post:

"The drawings of you and Jeff were done in 1978 by an artist in Silver Springs, which is in Ocala, FL. I remember because we were on our way to Daytona Beach, and I wanted to stop at Silver Springs to see where some of the underwater scenes from 'The Creature from the Black Lagoon' were filmed. That is my all time favorite horror movie I remember the year because I had just bought a brand new 1978 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and this was our first trip in that car. I remember the sticker shock I had when I had to pay over $7.000 for a new car! You're right about the matching shirts; Cherry made one for all four of us."