Saturday October 30, 2004 – Moments Frozen in Time

Saturday October 30, 2004 – Moments Frozen in Time

I have thousands of pictures that I’m trying to catalog in some sort of meaningful order, but the task is becoming overwhelming. The vast majority of the pictures are prints we’ve taken from the time my wife “I” and I began dating back in the spring of 1965. There are early pictures taken with “I”’s dependable Ricoh, stolen during a burglary a few year after we arrive in California—but that’s another story. They stole the instrument and left the captured moments, which were the far more valuable commodity.

There’s a picture of “I” and her friend O taken in front of an exhibition hall at the 1965 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow Park on Long Island. The exhibitions and crowds long since gone, though you’ve seen the remnants of the fairground pictured in the movie “Men in Black” where Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones confront the alien creature as he attempts to climb into one of the 226-ft New York State Towers—the structure is a space ship that will take the alien off the earth with the McGuffin (as Alfred Hitchcock called the object in a movie everyone is after).

The picture is out of focus and difficult to make out the very young faces of those two very pretty young women, but it nevertheless captures that moment with the sun shining brightly and “I” and O dressed in light summer dresses. It had to be late April or early May—my memory of the actual date is vague. In the background you can see the decorated exhibit halls and the throngs of people all moving from one to another. I remember how very carefree and happy we all were. AT&T had a picture phone exhibit in their hall where you could make a call to other sites all over the world where the then giant monopoly had set up centers for callers to show up at appointed times to see and hear their relations calling from the Fair.

All our lives are a sequence of moments some, like the one captured in that photo, more memorable than others. There’s another special photo of “I” and me, It was taken at the Copacabana restaurant and nightclub at 10 E60th in Manhattan by the staff photographer who would have prints for you to purchase before you’d left for the evening. We bought a large 8 by 10 in one of those folders with a frame that held the prized photograph. “I” is looking straight into the camera and smiling more with her eyes than her lips. I’m trying unsuccessfully to appear cool as I sat to the right of the camera and turned slightly to the left. Every time I hear Barry Manilow singing the song of the same name I think of that evening. Enzo Stuarti, an Italian Tenor—popular back then when he enjoyed a brief recording career, was the headliner that evening and his warm-up act was the comedian Rip Taylor.

The picture captures two young people starting their lives, neither aware they would be together this many years later. The fashion, the hairstyles, the room full of people behind them all color a picture of a time and a way of life that existed once but no longer. The Copacabana has long since ceased to be, probably replaced by something completely different, not even the disco of Manilow’s lyrics, though I should check my facts before making so bold a determination.

Then there is the picture of “I” and me at our wedding, two years later. The two people, though still young, are not the same as those pictured at the Copa. “I” had traveled from New York to Scotland to Australia and back again to the U.S. I had gone from New York to Japan and back. In the months of separation we had each become different people and the wedding picture reflected that change.

Fast forward another year and a half and there is a picture of “I” with our baby daughter “M”. From the time she entered the world embraced every living being around her. In the picture this pea-in-a-pod baby barely a few weeks old is looking into her mother’s eyes as if the two of them were in conversation. M remains a social magnet, the sort of person that others feel an immediate familiarity and comfort with.

In another picture our second daughter R, thumb in her mouth, is being held by her mother. Her long straight dark brown hair is held in two ponytails behind both ears; her bangs clipped to give a good view of her forehead and those lovely green eyes—though not obvious in this black and white photo. The occasion was a photo shoot being done by our friend P, a photographer/advertising agency account executive. His client was a large department store and he was convinced M and R would be perfect children's apparel models. All we needed was a portfolio of photographs and to list with the modeling agency that handled much of the model placements in Dallas, where we lived at the time. The photo shoot was far more enjoyable and memorable than the attempt to break into the competitive world of modeling.

Each of these captured images record brief seconds of a past life. The sum of all these photographs are an infinitely small proportion of the total seconds in any of our lives. Nevertheless, collectively they represent a past existance, the ghosts of our younger selves. Remarkably properly cared for, the recordings will have a far greater lifetime than any of the people captured within them. Perhaps, as some believe, the photograph captures a bit of your soul.