The Steiner family legacy is all but vanquished, dispersed to thrift shop curiosity-seekers such as D and me. The last relic of their identifiable legacy – a metal slide box of containing a handful of empty Airequipt slide magazines – seems to have been sold.

Several months ago, at a thrift shop, D and I spotted two metal boxes filled with family slides. It seemed expensive but we bought one of the boxes and together embarked on a mild fascination, reverse-engineering the lives of the people whose milliseconds and milestones were captured in these hundreds of personal family pictures.

The slides showed so much and yet they showed so little. We spent no small amount of time studying and researching scraps of information which appeared on the slides, trying to arrive at who these people were, where they lived, and what they did for a living. No doubt, most of the people seen in the slides were gone, but we imagined it must still be possible to re-unite these slides with someone connected to them. The scraps of information in the slides included names of businesses, signage and advertising, ephemeral clues from all types of scenes, and hand-written notes on the slides themselves. Some of the slides show structures and Brooklyn locations demolished decades ago. This potential for uniqueness, for snatching the memory of a place from oblivion, helped draw me further into this project and into the wider world of slide collecting.

Our pursuit ended on a Saturday afternoon. D was driving around in her car and I, in a rare moment of spontaneity, said "Let’s go to Stanton Road." (Stanton is not the real name of the road, nor is Steiner the real name of the family.) D was my hero for the day, leading the way on what has to be one of the most unusual road trips ever. Threading our way through a maze of unfamiliar streets we made the hour-long journey to a relatively remote part of Brooklyn. We had studied the pictures of the Steiner’s house but we wanted to see it for ourselves. We wanted to see how it was doing.

As we approached Stanton Road we got excited when we noticed that many of the houses in the area looked similar to the Steiner house: Two stories with a basement, an attic, and a triangular-shaped roof with 4 windows across the front of the first floor and 2 windows facing the street on the top floor. Many of the houses in the area followed that general design, and when we started seeing those houses we knew were close.

The arrival at the house was exciting and strange. I felt like we should tread carefully, and quietly, as we had made this random journey to the home of someone who likely had no idea that such visitors would ever lurk outside their front yard. We knew what the house looked like inside. We had memorized images of the ghosts from this house, the phantoms of a family and of lives that inhabited those rooms for decades but whose memory and ephemeral presences had vanished.

The visit to the house produced one final clue, one last bit of ephemera that gave us something concrete to look for in NYC public records. These searches quickly revealed that an 83 year old woman lived in the house. Other details emerged to reveal that she had been married to one of the men seen in the slides. The man’s first wife (seen throughout the slides) had died in the 1970s, and the woman living there now was his second wife. He died in 1985. The abstraction became a reality. She was a Steiner! I remembered how, while D and I stood outside the house, an upstairs light turned on. Maybe the 83 year old woman saw us, maybe she did not, but the innocence of our pursuit turned somewhat confusing. I am not certain that this woman appears in any of the slides, the majority of which pre-date her marriage to the man who died in 1985. Even though we had found a living connection between these slides and a family member it seemed like the connection was troubled. Knocking on an 83-year-old woman’s door and announcing "Hey, we have these slides that might interest you" would be an intrusion.

I might feel differently about this but for earlier life experiences. In particular I remembered my self-absorbed obsession with Richard Nixon. I had read that Mr. Nixon, while he was in college, wrote a theme song for a club called the Orthogonians. As a pianist I thought it would be fun to stuff a novelty piece like that into one of my recitals, perhaps programming it with other compositions by Nietzsche, Nabokov, and Tolstoy for a set of music by non-composers known for other things. For years I barked up Nixon’s tree, writing to his people, to him, to his libraries, all with what I thought was a simple, whimsical request for a copy of this song. Eventually a librarian made me aware that Nixon thought I was a nut case, an annoyance, and though I never heard directly from Nixon he seems to have specifically responded to my requests with a "No" and most likely a Nixonian [expletive deleted] flourish. I later learned that around this same time Nixon was taking Monica Crowley under his wing, letting the graduate student chronicle what she would call the "Winter" of his life. Crowley reached out to Nixon in the same manner as I, but she did it with substance while I did it with something else.

That memory of irritating Richard Nixon flitted briefly through my mind as I reached what is, for now, the end of my active interest in the Steiner legacy. I may well change my mind about this, but for now the spark of mystery and the thrill of the pursuit is cooled as my interest in slide collecting has evolved. Nevertheless, it seems strange but I look at the slides and I feel like I miss the Steiners. I never knew them but I miss them anyway.

I have since acquired thousands of slides, some complete sets from estate sales, others just random collections. Slide collecting and re-selling is a pretty active scene. I look for coherent sets of slides that chronicle a single family or group of people, but these end-to-end series seem to be rare or prohibitively expensive. Slide sellers tend to take these legacies (as I call them) and chop them up into themes, dispersing them into salable units that bomb the family stories into smithereens for the sake of making the most money for the seller.

The Steiner family slides were over 40 years old, but the quality of color retained on these images is amazing. These were Kodachrome slides with the red-framed mounts, a format which is the gold standard for old slides. The real miracle of Kodachrome, I think, is not just its color quality but its archival properties. I have slides from as long ago as 1942 and the richness of the color captured on these oldest slides in my collection actually surpasses the quality of color in slides from as recently as 1997.

In a bit of happy synchronicity I learned that one of the two individuals who invented Kodachrome was Leopold Godowsky, a composer-pianist whose arrangements of Schubert songs, Chopin Études, and shorter original compositions are in my hands. The sheer quantity of ink poured into even the simplest of Godowsky’s printed scores amazes me. Godowsky’s scores are not incomprehensible in complexity but I believe Claudio Arrau got it right when he said that many of Godowsky’s arrangements, with the multiple lines of counterpoint racing about, sound like "ants".

At any rate, it made me happy to make the connection between this new (to me) discovery of Kodachrome slides and its inventor whose piano music is a fixture in my life.

Also coincidentally, Kodachrome surfaced in the news around the time we bought the Steiner slides. Kodak announced it would cease production of Kodachrome film, citing a usage rate of less than 1% of its customers. This seemed unkind at first but it seems to have been inevitable.

America steps out from its black and white past in these old slides. Americans in the 1940s and 1950s were actually in color, not black and white. We always knew that, of course, but much of our concept of history is funneled through media and I think many people subtly perceive the first half of the 20th century as a herky-jerky, stiff period of flitting video reels and mercurial news photography.

This business of milling through the slides of a stranger has some gluttony about it. Artists and presidents donate their sketches and papers to museums and libraries but what research library catalogues the detritus of ordinary people? Who calculates the weights and measures of the relationships among strangers from discarded family photos. And more importantly: Why?

I would like to build a library that serves the opposite purpose of traditional libraries. Instead of accumulating knowledge the Library of the Living would recognize as vanity all text matter and human-generated content that had made a connection between its creator and anyone else. Knowledge, once spoken or written, becomes vulgar, scurrying away like cockroaches exposed to light. Earthly Wisdom Is a Lie might be the message on my library’s welcome mat. This library would build a path to wisdom gained through consumption and rejection of written and pictorial information. The library would reject materials that scholars and others have designated as significant. Once a book or work of art makes a connection with an audience or with critics then that item is removed from the Library. I would house collections like the Steiner slides in my library, along with other objects whose meaning never traveled.

American lives. I have been spying on American lives, and these pasts start to look the same. Last week I saw a family walking home from mosque and in my mind I saw them framed, that instant of their lives frozen in Kodachrome. Your lives look like other lives, which in turn resemble other random legacies. Those frozen moments I’ve spied on these past months were not really frozen. The people moved. They spoke. Our ephemeral movements largely define us in life but this nuance is captured by nothing. I think about this now. On a city bus last month I felt the roar of that over-sized vehicle as it motored down 5th Avenue. Streetlights were green as far as I could see and the mill of tourists’ legs outside the Louis Vuitton store created the illusion of a picket fence. None of this was recorded nor will it be made available to scholars hired to define an era. More of our present is flushed away than could ever be remembered.