Looking Back
Today's Decameron is a scene from Pamela Dean's forthcoming book, Going North. Reading that makes me want to return to The Secret Country books. (Which I will do when this book appears!)
Since we cannot go anywhere, I've buckled down (for a certain amount of time each day) to labeling the mass of family photos that my daughter paid to have scanned some years ago. But the scanner jumbled them all together, and of course each just comes with a label like 450650f0rt0g.jpg I wish I'd done this earlier, because there are some from the forties and early fifties that I can't identify. I might try them on my mom in hopes of moments of lucidity: she is generally more reliable about the past than the present.
Some are so revealing, with the insight afforded by time. Then there are the ones that look casual--one would scarcely give them a second glance, like one of four people standing in a circle next to a parked car. But I look at that, remembering the secrets that every one of the four had at the time--life-changing secrets: the forty-something woman in the bikini was secretly having an affair with the man (both married to other people), the teenage boy at the right was gay, and didn't dare come out for another fifteen years, but he's standing next to a teenage girl as if they are together, and she had her own horrible secret that she didn't dare let her father, at her right, find out. But his attention is all on the woman in the bikini.
The ones of people now gone really hurt, especially the pictures of them so young. Time is remorseless. But as long as memory lasts, at least we've got that.
This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/1025595.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Since we cannot go anywhere, I've buckled down (for a certain amount of time each day) to labeling the mass of family photos that my daughter paid to have scanned some years ago. But the scanner jumbled them all together, and of course each just comes with a label like 450650f0rt0g.jpg I wish I'd done this earlier, because there are some from the forties and early fifties that I can't identify. I might try them on my mom in hopes of moments of lucidity: she is generally more reliable about the past than the present.
Some are so revealing, with the insight afforded by time. Then there are the ones that look casual--one would scarcely give them a second glance, like one of four people standing in a circle next to a parked car. But I look at that, remembering the secrets that every one of the four had at the time--life-changing secrets: the forty-something woman in the bikini was secretly having an affair with the man (both married to other people), the teenage boy at the right was gay, and didn't dare come out for another fifteen years, but he's standing next to a teenage girl as if they are together, and she had her own horrible secret that she didn't dare let her father, at her right, find out. But his attention is all on the woman in the bikini.
The ones of people now gone really hurt, especially the pictures of them so young. Time is remorseless. But as long as memory lasts, at least we've got that.
This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/1025595.html. Please comment there using OpenID.