Family Pictures ...

A few years back I was visiting my sister in South Carolina and one night after dinner she brought out a bag of photographs she had been given by our mother. Our family is not very good about keeping its history intact. I don’t recall ever seeing a family photo album; instead pictures were stored in shoe boxes or large brown bags or not at all. When one of my brothers was very sick recently I went to his apartment to pick up some clothes and give the place a good cleaning before he returned home from the hospital. In the process I came across a stash of dozens of photographs taken by our father shortly after World War II. The photos were all curled up together and I can only imagine that they must have been bound by an elastic band or rolled up in a drawer all these many decades. When I asked my brother about the pictures he told me he had rescued them from the trash pile when our mother was cleaning out or old house. He had rescued other relics of our family’s past as well and they were sprinkled around his living room as if he had just been using them before he left. Some of the items I recognized from trips to the attic long ago, like our father’s Navy flight helmet and bright orange flight suit. The family pictures I discovered at my sisters that night have special significance to me because they are pictures of the early generations of my father’s family in America. Like me, many of them had left a place they knew, and possibly even loved, for a land they had only heard of, in search of a better life. I have made the reverse commute, crossing the same ocean that they crossed but in the opposite direction, coming back to the Old World they left behind, searching as well, for something they left behind.