Looking at old photos

This morning I worked.  I wrote and thought and designed and printed and now I am finally at a point where I feel I am ready to deliver some really good training sessions tomorrow.  As I was collating papers and looking through old course materials I designed years ago, I realised that I have probably forgotten more than most people in my field know.  I can't really believe that my brain holds so much information.  It truly is remarkable that I have so much trivia and so many facts and figures stored in my permanently stressed mind.

I see that I still prefer to see things in visual form on paper in front of me.  I am certainly visual and kinesthetic in the way I learn and communicate.  I need to see and feel things in order for me to get to grips with information and communications. I can look at endless documents on my computer and cut and paste to create new documents, but until I have the printed page in my hands, I can't really decide whether it's right.

I have the same feeling about old photos.  This afternoon, when I'd had enough of writing and reading for work I got out a bag of old photos that I hadn't really looked at for quite some years.  The old black and white photos of my mom and dad were the ones that really grabbed me.  The dog-eared ragged edges of the photos and the immediate post-war life they depict are the stuff of history and dreams for me. I try to imagine my mother in Feldafing, the displaced persons' camp in Germany where she lived  for a time between the war's end and her traveling from Bremen to New York by sea. The photos are of a very young woman, often smiling, but looking pale and puffy.  How different she became soon after arriving in New York.  Suddenly in photos she looked quite beautiful and carefree.  In the year in which she waited for my father to arrive she also seemed to have a number of mysterious suitors.  She and my father didn't marry till he arrived in America. When I was a little girl I remember finding these photos and asking who the men with my mum were.  My mother got terribly embarrassed and tore up some of the photos.  I'm glad she didn't destroy all of them.

I was particularly touched by some old photos that my father used to carry in his wallet.  They are old and faded from living in his back pocket for years.  There were baby pictures of me and my brother, ones of my brother at his bar mitzvah, me at my high school graduation, a wonderful old photo of my mum from 1947 and a picture of my father's brother, the only one of his family to survive the war. I found it so sweet that he carried these photos around for years.

In certain cultures it is believed that photographing someone steals their soul.  I don't believe that at all, but I do believe that the old photos I have contain some essence of my past.  They are a tangible link to the younger selves that once were my parents, their friends and me.  I love having these reminders of our past.  It is especially important to me now there is no one to tell the stories anymore.  My father is the last of his generation.  His memory is gone and all we have are photos and the garbled stories we carry in us and should be passing on to our children.

Who can we ask when there's no one left to ask? I still have so much I want to know.