YOU GET THE PICTURE
One of my favorite pastimes in young adulthood was casually sitting and looking through the photo albums of my parents, in-laws, and aunt. My husband and I took many, many pictures throughout the years of our dating and marriage. We never really had the chance, however, to go through them and reminisce.
Our voluminous collection includes the growth years of our children, plus all our family vacations. Those trips suddenly upended when the harrowing Coronavirus caused a mandatory lockdown.
While the albums shared by our elders were nostalgic, the photographs of our nuclear family are more like current events. As it turns out, though, most of the pages I sifted through in the past several months entailed more distant memories than I realized. This trip down memory lane has been cathartic.
By simply pulling out my iPhone, I was able to take pictures of probably hundreds from the thousands of photographs, some neatly stored in photo albums, others found loose in folders. Many of them, now stored on my iPhone, I sent to our immediate family via our WhatsApp group, effortlessly forwarding others to friends and relatives with a click of the arrow.
Each time the iPhone emitted that familiar swishing sound, indicating the picture was on its way, I looked forward to the reactions from the recipients. There were photographs of several friends and relatives no longer with us and others we have been close with for nearly a lifetime. Some are divorced, while others have been together almost as long as we have.
When I sent a few of her baby pictures to a first cousin once removed, she replied, “Thank you so much!! I had never seen those! I love them.” She and her wife have two boys about the ages that her older brother, she, and her twin brother are in the photograph above. She and her siblings are seen in the row of three car seats, crammed into the back of their family car.
Her father was a first cousin of my husband, they were the same age, and they worked together at a summer camp. We were friends/cousins, sporadically together, until he and his family moved out of the area. Then, we only saw them on rare occasions, unfortunately, such as at funerals until his untimely passing in 2016. It was interesting to reconnect with his children as Facebook friends since we knew them when…, which brought closure to our years apart.
There are classics in the mounds of photographs, which tell a story that lives on in our memory banks. When we stumble upon any of them, an ear-to-ear smile automatically emerges. One shows Sean sitting with my husband on our old riding lawnmower. That toddler is now the father of two boys and fast approaching 40; I met his mother when we entered grad school in 1978.
While going through another stashed folder of photos, I found a quintessential one of my mother engaging by the fence with her best friend, Mildred. I had blogged about Mildred on May 21, 2019, but could not put my finger on the photo of the bosom buddies. I just added the telling 1968 photograph to the bottom of that blog post and contacted my friend Sharon, Mildred’s daughter, to have her check it out. She replied, unsurprisingly, “I loved it.”
You meet some of your best friends at work and become family friends. In one of the parties we hosted with friends from work, a picture of our son Judd, now an associate at a prestigious New York City law firm, is posing while playing with Carlos, now a VP at Goldman Sachs.
An array of black and white pictures appeared. My father snapped them at the ceremony when my husband, fresh out of law school in 1976, became a Deputy Attorney General in New Jersey. Who knew that my husband would be selected by his peers as the 2017 Lawyer of the Year in Employment Law? Who would have guessed that his co-worker from the Attorney General’s office, standing next to him in one of the pictures, would now be a Justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court?
Stop me; I could go on and on about our saved pictures, the memories, and the comments, but the message is clear. Get out those old photographs and have some fun. You will be surprised at the amount of conversation they will generate.
So glad I wrote all the identifying information on the back of the picture from the title page above
Arnee Cohen and Sean Ganey August 1982 South Orange, New Jersey
Ida Mark and Mildred Kader July 1968 Elizabeth, New Jersey
Carlos and Judd South Orange, New Jersey
Arnee Cohen and Barry Albin December 9, 1976 Trenton, New Jersey