B. Nearly 50 Years Ago.
What a strange week it's been for me. The air conditioner replacement ended up taking three days of my time. Don't ask! But everything is now finally working as it should and the house is comfortable again. Just in time since the temperatures are starting to spike and aim toward their usual Summer range of discomfort. B. was in San Antonio helping with her mom so the task of handling the project fell to me.
I've had central AC units replaced four times in my adult life and it seems that the ones on the way out always fail at the least opportune times. Dead of Summer. In the midst of a heat wave. On a busy week. The cost of AC replacement for a house of a certain size increases year by year but this is the first time that I felt like I could just throw money at the project without consequences. I guess knowing that was the silver lining for the week.
I'm a bit anxious about the surgery to remove some cancer from my face this coming Tuesday. It's not that I'm fearing some negative result of the procedure as much as this sort of malady seems to signal to me some sort of encroaching mortality. Something I can't just pay my way out of. It also makes me worry about what the next shoe to drop might be.
I tease a bit about my anxiety of being out of the swimming pool and away from my swim friends for the time it takes to heal the wounds and deal with sutures but underlying that is the very real uneasiness about having a changed routine. It will be the first time I won't be in the water for a couple of the hottest weeks of a Summer and, on paper, that doesn't look good. I swim with a psychiatrist who constantly tells me that doctors tend to be way too conservative and that I could be back in the water within a week. I'd love to believe him but...
Over the last week I've been diving into older and older files of negatives and I showed, a few days ago, images from a long trip I took during my college days, to Europe. I'm not sure that it's healthy to revisit the past. For any number of reasons. But the reason it seemed to affect me the most is that the images reflected the sheer freedom I felt in those days. I traveled with a backpack full of clothes, a small camera bag, a collection of travelers checks in several different currencies, and a girlfriend. We had no real agenda for the months during which we traveled. We made no reservations at all. Not at hotels or restaurants. We'd just show up and see if a decent looking place had vacancies. Or if there were good campgrounds to be had. Or if a restaurant was filled with locals and had a menu that looked good. We never really thought about money, or getting back to work, or buying cars. We had a semester off and could do as we pleased. A fantasy for lots of people.
So... the photos reflect the casual and unhurried nature of the trip. Which contrasts so much with the next 45 years of teaching, starting and running businesses, raising a child into a fully functional adult and all the other stuff. During my 30s, 40s and 50s it always seemed like vacations were planned around work, and the need to get right back to work. Two weeks was about the limit I could tolerate before I started worrying about client base erosion, bills coming due and the logistics of running a business without employees who could take over in my absence.
Seeing the old photos, revisited in scans and fine-tuned in Lightroom, makes me wonder now about the rationality of my early choices. Whether my focus in life was less than optimal. Especially now that photography seems to be, commercially, in a rapid and unyielding decline.
I have to remind myself that no one could predict the future. No one makes choices in a vacuum. That my own life has been largely without serious trauma or deprivation. That I've been surrounded by good friends and loving family.
And yet, seeing images from a time in my life when everything seemed possible, everything seemed to be in reach, and a time when we had decades and decades of runway in front of us makes me very nostalgic for that time --- when we were thin and beautiful and unencumbered by the mundanity of every day life. When everything we thought we needed fit into a backpack. When 401Ks and mortgages were an indistinct concept we could put off into the future. A time in which good hiking shoes were our easy aspiration.
For me it was also a time of first discovery in photography. Totally unconstrained by having to decide between cameras or formats or systems. When I traveled in 1978 my girlfriend and I shared the two cameras we'd brought along. Nothing more would make sense to carry along with us. While my grasp of the process wasn't has sharply and deeply honed as it is now that was compensated by the thrill of learning something new and looking forward a couple of months to making prints in a co-operative darkroom. Watching black and white prints come to fruition in the Dektol. Learning to make comprehendible contact sheets. And sharing the prints with small circles of friends. Having "beginner's eyes."
Scanning old memories can be painful. Lost love. Changing landscapes at home. A world that never slows down it changes; mostly for the worst. The images paint a clear picture of what's been lost for us and how much we miss those things when confronted with proof of their prior existence.
The slender bodies of youth. The swimming holes not yet surrounded by endless subdivisions, quiet train rides unsullied by the relentless, banal chatter of people yakking away on their cellphones, mountains unadorned by recreational constructions and cameras that didn't beg one to surrender wholly to immediacy. No need to hurry out photographs. Something to save for later; for leisure.
I guess I scan them to remind myself that any talent I have as a photographer was already there in the beginning and that the relentless acquisition of technical knowledge, coupled with an ever increasing selection of "better" and better gear, had nothing to do with my actual enjoyment or competency concerning photography. In fact, some of the earliest images seem like my best work...at least to me.
I say, from my experiences, that you should be careful how deeply you revisit your past. It may make you happy but it may make you sad. There is always a tendency with hindsight to experience regret for the roads not traveled. If you are happy with life today it's not so dangerous. If you are more and more unsatisfied as time goes on then better memories from a time in your own past might trigger a sadness you might not want or need to deal with in the moment. It's the regret mostly that you didn't take the chances you were presented. Preferring, as we mostly do, security over risk.
Eventually all of the work will disappear. You'll be long gone. Maybe it's best instead to seize the moment, seize each newly arriving day and make the most of that. Better than longing for that full head of brown hair, that 30 inch waist, that svelte and amiable girlfriend, that open space with blue skies and clean air.
Just a few cloudy thoughts after scanning too much of my early adulthood. Before routine and responsibility intruded. We always meant to slow down and enjoy that life again at the other end of being responsible but it's hard to unlearn the lessons of working, saving, focusing on making the bucks.
It's hard to sever the umbilical cord of security...
What would we give to have back the energy and the potential we were richly endowed with 50 years ago? Knowing what we know now would we do things differently?
First portrait of B.
And 15 years ago.
And at a favorite restaurant now long gone.
And at the very beginning of the road.
Grab love and happiness while it's in your grasp.
I don't regret my choices. I do wish I could have seen life's menu as we
progressed along through the years...
Me. On the Eiffel Tower. October 1978
there is that serene version of breaststroke, slow and elegant with head held high the whole time. Amuses me whenever i see someone taking some exercise in the slow lane, without disturbing their hair and makeup : )
ReplyDeleteA/C failures, appliance failures, car problems, these will always arrive at inopportune moments. Those contraptions will only fail when you're using them. When else? Stuff breaks, there's no escape.
ReplyDeleteAs you get older -- I'm 81 -- the past seems to increasingly colonize your thoughts. What you could have done, what you should have done, and rarely, what you did right. It can be quite depressing. At least a partial answer is to consciously focus on the future, although when you're in your eighties, that doesn't seem to stretch out too far, and you begin running into limitations of what you can actually do, no matter how much you want to do it (my free all-day mountain-walking days are over.) There's also another thing (I believe.) Things WERE better when we were younger. A great deal of American bitterness derives from the fact that we have a huge population that is simply being left behind. Is efficiency really the goal of life? It's probably possible right now to build over-the-road semis that could travel from city to city on the Interstate highways perfectly safely, and way cheaper than hiring humans to do it. But what do we do with two million jobless truck drivers? AI could probably eliminate a lot of boiler-plate legal and accounting work -- but what do we do with 1.3 million lawyers and 1.7 accountants who struggled to get through school and are then thrown out of jobs? When I was growing up, jobs weren't a problem. You could actually work your way through college. When I got my MA in journalism, I went directly to The Miami Herald, at the time, one of the best papers in the county. I later moved to St. Paul, because I wanted to be closer to family, and had no trouble making the move. Now, people can get an MBA and go years without work, deep in debt the whole time. I bought a house with a VA loan with virtually no money down, and the mortgage was easy to meet. Now? The idea of buying a house right out of college, without help, is laughable in most places. And if you listen to music in public places...much of it seems to come from the 60s-90s. When you think of great movies, the same. When I see people begging on the street, I'm ashamed of what's happened. The same is true of American politics, which now seems to be in the hands of people who simply want to fight, instead of govern. Same with the culture wars. Maybe I'm just old, but I don't think so: I think things were better in the late 20th century.
ReplyDeleteA post like this one is best discussed over a great meal and a bottle of outstanding wine. You are one fortunate man Kirk Tuck. Our generation grew up in a unique and somewhat blessed period of time. Probably never to be seen again.
ReplyDeleteEric
Very nice summary of the road traveled versus the road not traveled. Sometimes, luck plays a big role. Someone offers you a job, you say sure, and off you go to a new adventure. That's how this Bostonian ended up in Houston in 1980 - one of several previous lives.
ReplyDeleteAhhh, there’s a lot to unpack here. I’ll confine myself to a few small points.
ReplyDeleteKirkI've had central AC units replaced four times in my adult life and it seems that the ones on the way out always fail at the least opportune times. Dead of Summer.
One summer afternoon hace muchos ańos, my wife phoned to inform me the air conditioner in our Washington, D.C., home had expired during an unusual Washington hot spell (>100º Fahrenheit and humid) while I was shivering on a business trip in Vancouver, B.C. during an unusual cool spell. (Schadenfreude alert.) The errant unit couldn’t be revived: had to replace it. Eventually, we built a new house in a small Maryland city not far from Washington, where we installed heat pumps to supply cool air in summer and warm air in winter. One winter, during an unusual cold spell, one of them died and the lower floors of the house turned arctic. That unit couldn’t be revived, either: had to replace it. Murphy understood: there’s no escaping his Law. However much you try to cushion yourself from the effects of the unexpected, the one thing you can rely on is that the unexpected eventually catches up with you.
As for scanning old negatives, the emotions they evoke may be mixed, but as they taught me in law school, a witness occasionally needs to refresh his or her recollection to recover an accurate memory of something than happened in the past. I think it’s easier to understand decisions you made and paths not taken when you have a good recollection of what you were thinking at the time. Of course, we all wish we could go back to when we were younger. Not so much to correct mistakes, I suspect, but because everything was easy back then.
ReplyDeleteHaving recently been retrieving old negative files from the 70s (and the 60s, too!), there is also the temptation of using modern software to “improve” photographs. I’ve come to wonder whether that isn’t a way of denying that these are times past, may of them memorable, some of them wonderful, and no denoising, sharpening or AI software manipulation will really augment, or even meaningfully alter those memories. Having reached a point of having many more days in the past than ahead, focusing on getting the most out of those ahead seems much more worthwhile. Having just taken a week off regular workouts and getting out and taking pictures because of recovering from a medical issue not to be dignified with any further description, I can only echo the Steve Miller band: “time keeps on slippin’, into the future….” We need to make the most of it.