Yesterday the doorbell rang. Not expecting anything I ignored it. Later I went downstairs and noticed a handwritten note addressed to my apartment number. The note said that UPS had accidentally delivered my package to a building across the street. The note was unsigned but whoever wrote it added that the package was too heavy for them to carry across the street.
I had an idea what this might be but I was wrong. Since the note mentioned how heavy the thing was I thought it would be a footlocker full of stuff from the house where I grew up in Tampa. I have been expecting that for months. Instead it was a pretty heavy package filled with old copies of The Etude music magazines. This was sent to me by someone who contacted me about two years ago to say he had a stack of these magazines that he wanted me to have. This was after he discovered my Etude Magazine website which has a bunch of content from that magazine.
When this person contacted me I was interested. But that was two years ago. Fast forward to this hour where I do not particularly care about that magazine anymore and I don’t think I ever will again. I guess it’s unkind to complain about this seemingly generous gesture but the follow through took so long that for all the sender knew I might not even live here anymore.
Today the doorbell rang again. I ignored it again. I went downstairs later and found that he had sent another package with even more magazines. This time, obviously, UPS delivered it to the right address. In total it looks like the sender spent 25 or 30 bucks on shipping, and for all I know more are on the way.
Just for the hell of it I looked him up online. He has a very distinctive name and was easy to find. He is a postal worker and a musician. He looks like a really nice guy. But the irony of things is that for all its generosity his gift might be what inspires me to discard all my copies of that magazine. Like a lot of things in my life their presence has gone from interesting to weighing me down with its stench of accumulation. It’s not just their physical presence but the quantity of time I burned trying to make something useful from them only to find there was extremely limited interest in them. I do not feel like a hoarder. But I put enough time and energy into scanning and organizing that collection that just throwing it away would feel like I was being mean to myself.
I feel similarly about a dozen or so boxes full of Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides I acquired, mostly through eBay. I have scanned all of them, as far as I can tell. But I thought I should retain the physical objects in case I ever needed to refer to the handwritten matter on the slides themselves, or on the slide trays and boxes.
But now I think I should do what the people who left these things behind did, and just let them go.
When I first started collecting slides I imagined myself reuniting them with whoever might have some connection to them. It took me a while to conclude that anybody who might be connected to these things was probably gone or just did not care. Why else would they be in thrift shops and online auctions?
I went on one quest with a girlfriend at the time to see if a woman in Brooklyn wanted her slides back. We got right to her front door but I chickened out. It was just as well. I learned later that the woman whose slides I possessed had died many months prior. There was probably nobody in that house who would have had any interest in the slides.
That was my first real adventure with this type of thing. By studying these slides and the accompanying text matter on some of them I assembled a general timeline and gleaned a certain amount of intrigue about the Brooklyn family pictured therein. Among other things it looked like the husband traveled to Arizona or Nevada to see an Asian woman with whom it appeared he had had an affair while he was in the military.
Another memorable set of slides came from a U.S. military family that had been stationed in Germany. I was able to outline almost their complete family history as far as where they moved and what kind of life they lived, drilling all the way down to getting Streetview to show me the very modest house they occupied in Decatur, Georgia, after returning from Germany.
I identified with them because I was an Army brat, too, living in Laos for a couple of years. I was also in Ghana but not old enough to remember anything save for one experience: Being on a military cargo jet from Accra to Berlin, Germany. The plane flew over The Sahara as the sun came up. A bunch of encampments with burning campfires dotted the sandy horizon. I heard my mother say something like “It’s beautiful!” That is my earliest living memory and the only thing I remember from being in Ghana.
Unlike a lot of military unions the husband and wife in the slides do not appear to have either separated or divorced. (Virtually every married couple we knew in Laos went on to divorce or separate.)
The two daughters came of age in the 1970s and looked like they transformed from doll-like cuties into total hippies. If anyone would have been interested in having the slides back it would have been the daughters, but then they are the individuals most likely responsible for letting them wash up on eBay.
I think the daughters abandoned their parents. They did not appear in any pictures after sometime in the 1970s, and of course the family slides went up for grabs on eBay by a seller who probably acquired them in the style of American Pickers.
I sound like I cared about these people. I think I did. I liked watching everyone age. I think the wife (like my mother, I think) had more ambition in life than being a stay-at-home military wife. I think she wanted to be a photographer. There was an uplift in her expression in certain pictures that made me think she was trying to stand out, or attempting to communicate something. The husband looked like a bit of a chucklehead, secure in life without getting particularly wealthy. The two daughters were cute when they were kids but I think they got lost.
For the most part, though, I think that if you look through enough of slides from random families you come away thinking that lives are boring. My experience wading through such things mirrors my relationship with gambling at a casino. It’s fun at first and I enjoy the blinking lights and funny sounds. But it quickly becomes monotonous, boring, and then depressing as I look around the casino and see the place as a lot of frosting a big fat turd. My endpoint with studying family slides does not go that far down the drain but the sentiments are similar.
