A recent obsession has seeped into my dreams. For the past week, as I've been slow with work, I've immersed myself into getting all my old family photographs scanned, catalogued, labelled and safely stored. Quite a few years ago, my mother gave me an old, hand-made box containing a couple of hundred (at least) photos, all of them gently curled, mostly of people in my maternal grandmother's life.
I've also been working with a lot of already-digitized photos my father had scanned, which needed separating into individual files and labelling. I recognized a lot fewer of the people in these photos, as you'd expect, not having grown up with my father around, or hearing his family stories over the years. And I've just realized there are a ton of photos of my own which still need to be scanned and organized. (This job just got a LOT bigger!)
No one on either side of my family is or was a professional photographer, or even, from all appearances, an avid shutterbug. All of the photos are typical family snapshots. Not particularly well composed or lit, often very mundane, usually stiffly posed, occasionally completely random, like moments snatched from time. But, to me, and I hope to my living family members and those who follow us, these photographs are things of beauty and wonder.
Imagine realizing, for the first time, that the photo you've been looking at is that of a great-great-grandparent. Just yesterday I realized that the oldest photo I've been able to identify, my maternal great-grandfather (photo above, James Moran), is the great-GREAT-grandfather of my niece, Julie, who has expressed an interest in learning more about her family history (much to my delight). How exciting to see the photo of an ancestor who existed five generations prior to your own!
And yesterday, my father helped me identify a photo of my great-grandmother on HIS side, which was really exciting for me. All of this putting of names to faces this past week has made me feel far more connected to my past than I ever have before, and it's a sensation that I welcome happily. All of my adult life I've regretted the fact that I couldn't remember my own childhood. I envy so badly my best friend Tonia, who says she remembers everything. Oh, to have that gift!! For me, my childhood is a series of disjointed and faded mental snapshots - and precious few of them - out of context, often inexplicable and often, as I learned, possibly not even genuine.
A few years ago I told my father of a memory I had in which he and I had gone for a drive in his car when I was a very small girl. I remember seeing my feet sticking straight out beyond the edge of the car seat because I was too small for my legs to bend at the knees over the edge. In my memory, my dad was telling me he was going to move far away. I asked him if I could go with him and he said no. My father says that never happened, yet I remember it as if it did. Was it a dream? Was it a fusion of several different memories? Surely I'd been for drives in my father's car as a small girl. Surely there was a moment when my father told me he was moving away. Somehow they turned into one single memory.
The beauty of old family photos is that they fix a moment in time, so there's no mistaking who was there or where they were or whether or not the moment even happened. They give us the truly magical experience of seeing reflections of your own face in the faces of people four or five generations earlier. I can recognize my father in his father's face, and my brother looks just like my father. It's amazing and wonderful. I see myself in my mother, and my great-grandmother as young women. It connects me to them physically.
(I'll digress for a moment here and share my firm belief that the practice of following genealogical lines through paternity is misguided. It's really the women in every family who carry the closest connection. Did you know that, if you are female, you - or the egg that eventually became you - actually existed inside the body of your grandmother? Every woman is born with every egg she'll ever produce already inside her body. That means that my egg formed and spent several months inside my grandmother's body while she was pregnant with my mother. That concept absolutely thrills me, and was the inspiration for a novel I will someday write.)
So, to dreams. This morning, shortly before waking, as often happens, I had some vivid dreams. In the first, I had gone to Vancouver to visit my ex sister-in-law, Doreen. The Vancouver in my dream was nothing like the real Vancouver. We were driving all over and eventually wound up in a large shopping mall where we had to climb an odd sloping wall to get to another part of the mall.
That dream must have morphed into the next dream, in which I found myself with my cousins Joanne and Linda, wandering around the city. At one point we stopped for lunch in a crowded restaurant. I noticed a very pregnant black woman come in and greet her family at the other side of the room. A while later, there was a commotion over there and voila, the baby was born and the mother was leaving the restaurant with it in her arms. Then a different black woman, dressed like a police officer, was at our table telling us the baby hadn't made it, and then the police woman broke down sobbing at our table and I was comforting her. After that, Joanne and Linda and I left to do some shopping downtown (and once again, it was no downtown Ottawa that I ever saw). We went into an intriguing little bookstore which also sold lots of other lovely trinkets and baubles. I had decided I needed a new notebook in which to write my memories so I wouldn't forget them. I made my way to the back of the store, past a woman seated at a public computer where a man was helping her find something. I stood in front of a table display of beautiful notebooks, trying to decide which one I wanted (in my dream, as in my life, the choice of a notebook is an important one!). And there the dream ended and turned into something bizarre and inexplicable involving a remote ice shelf where a tribe of forgotten people and weird animals lived.
Dreams reflect life, albeit in sometimes bizarre and inexplicable ways.
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