rekkidblogga

How did our eyes get so red?

Much of my day has been spent putting photos, new and old, into albums and I realized that somehow I've become the documentarian of my family. As far as I know, that is. I never see anyone else whipping out a camera when we're all together, so I guess it's me.

But that's OK. I enjoy snapping candids of us doing family stuff since we're not together that much and, compared to some of my friends and their kin, we're sort of just getting the hang of it after all these years. Don't get me wrong, though; we have plenty of old photos in albums from our family's apparent heyday -- the 1970s -- when my parents were in their 40s, my sister was a swinging twentysomething and Cinnamon and I were kids.

There's a great group of photos telling a summertime story. The whole family is partying at the old house. Why? Because my parents finally traded in our 1973 sky blue Ford Gran Torino station wagon, ("The Old Blue Ghost") that Cinnamon and I tore up with too many spilled Cokes and dropped snacks and fights on trips and lost little toys, in for a shiny new red truck at East Point Chevrolet. And we're all posing with the new toy -- in the truck bed, on the hood, standing by it, whatever. My Aunt Jean and Uncle Randy drove down from Smyrna to see it. Doris Ann from up the street just had to come down and see what all the fuss was about, which meant Tracy tagged along, which meant Cinnamon and I probably tried to hide from her but couldn't because there were too many people around. My sister's former best friend, Donna, was there, being the coolest, hippest '70s chick ever. There's a great shot of them back then, when they still had things in common.

And Aunt Roseanne swung by, too, just over from College Park. We called her "Aunt" Roseanne even though she's really just my mom's best friend. We still do because we love her. She's our aunt like that. Even Marie, Yvonne and Melinda, the three redheaded sisters from down the street, joined the party. My mom took a shot of all of us in the backyard with Cinnamon's shaggy black dog, Muttley. Maybe Tracy wasn't there. She didn't like those girls and Cinnamon told her once that they were our friends and if she didn't like them, SHE could go home.

Most of my photos these days are of my nieces and the vacations we've taken together or the daytrips we've enjoyed at the zoo or up in the North Georgia mountains or from back a few years when they lived up in Iowa and I'd visit. There are pictures, too, that the girls will probably wish I'd never taken when they're teenagers: the famed "Diaper Babies!" shots. Cinnamon and I know these are gold - parental blackmail tools for years to come. The best part is that in most of the snaps, the girls are just being little girls - making weird faces, goofing off, smiling innocently, thinking kid thoughts in quiet moments.

If you put them side by side with the old shots of my niece - their mom - and me back in the '70s, back during that summer afternoon house party that someone in our family had the good sense to document for all time, you see that my nieces are a lot like us. Or actually, that we were once a lot like them.

For a fascinating look at one man's life in pictures, go here and look at everything. And I mean everything. How cool is Miles Hochstein?

posted by rekkidbraka @ 7:02 PM