I've always had an affinity for old things, enhanced of late as I've become one. In my travels I search out the abandoned, homes, sheds and garages and barns, graveyards and headstones, old factories and mills and farms. I like to see them and think about their history, all the things that happened there. People who lived there, worked there, loved and died there. I like old stuff. I have old coins, books, all my old family photos from both sides. I am my family's historian. Much of it will die with me but I will preserve as much as I can and hope that someday down the road that my children or grandchildren will become curious and seek the past as I have.
I come from people and a time when there was emphasis on where we came from and how we got to where we are. My father will soon be eighty-seven years old and I've been gleaning as much history from him as I can over the past few years. Today's attention is on the present. Old is yesterday's emails, last year's hit songs. I've been blessed with memory that enables me to have a living timeline embedded deep inside me. Not just my timeline but I can see the origin and progression of my life and those around me like a chart in a history book. I know when my first German ancestor came to America, when my French ancestors came to Quebec and where both migrated into the US and Canada. I have family keepsakes from early last century and photographs from nearly a hundred years ago. There isn't really any continuity on either the patriachal or matriarchal sides of my family that will keep these embers glowing and it's sad to think that over one hundred and fifty years of who we are and how we got here will most likely scatter with my ashes.
My paternal grandparents had a huge wooden barn partially converted to a garage on their property and my maternal grandparents had a similar wood slatted detached garage, much smaller but of equal fascination to me as a young boy. Both with dirt floors and nooks and crannies holding useful and useless things of endless magical fascination. My mother's father had a box of racy paperback pulps, modest by today's standards with nary a word that couldn't be printed in a church newslater today. But oh the phrasing, those were adjectives and sentences that could send a young man's heart to racing. Those books, along with my uncle's collection of pornagraphic comic books that my cousin and I would sneak out to the garage with along with a cigar stolen the night before while he slept in his recliner in front of the TV would entertain us for hours, wide-eyed and puffing and coughing. By twelve my sexual education was far advanced of anything any health class had to offer. To this day I can pen erotica that does not have a word you can't say to your mother. Just don't put them in the same order.
I have hundred year old books, silver dollars from the 1800's, a Spanish silver piece of eight from a 1715 shipwreck off the coast of Florida. I love holding things like this in my hand. Some of the books were picked up from used booksellers from cities around the US and from dusty shelves in England and off a small stall on the Seine in Paris. Some have inscriptions and I like to think about the people who gave and were given the prize of a book, long dead but briefly resurrected as I read their names.
It is said that you die twice, once with your last breath and again when your name is spoken for the last time. As much as life is disposable these days I wonder if most of us will have much shorter second lives.
Some photographs from my recent travels that speak to my old soul.
I said Mrs. Thankfull Chapman's name aloud. I wonder how long her second death had lay dormant.