Matching Tracksuits

Looking back over my childhood, I remember family reunions occurring with some regularity. All the aunts, uncles, grandparents, great-aunts, great-uncles, great-grand parents, cousins, and significant others would rent some place or another and come together for an afternoon of horse shoes, fried chicken, gossip and sweet tea.

It’s been years since I’ve been to one. Saturday, the streak was broken.

Most, if not all, of the family reunions I attended were for my father’s side. Saturday, it was Nana’s side’s turn. Because I know Papa’s side of the family better, it was an odd feeling, in a room full of strangers who constitute an extended family.

There was food and there was gospel singing:

“One thing about the W family,” said Papa. “They can sure sing.”

By the entrance there was a table of old photographs, including one of my maternal grandfather with his two brothers (essentially in the left-center of the picture below).

I never met him as he passed away long, long before I was born. I honestly don’t even know very well what he looked like, but Nana informed me that there was an uncle who looked very similar.

Everyone hovered around the picture table, though. They were the only record of many like my grandfather: people who would have loved to have seen how a small family grew into a small army company’s worth of people.

Seeing I had a fair amount of camera equipment (and associating equipment with skill, I suppose), a gentleman approached me to take some pictures of old faded images that he’d like to have copies of.

Of all the pictures snapped Saturday afternoon, these are worth more than all of those combined. These are the ones that somehow truly fulfill the role photographs are supposed to play in people’s lives.

A look at a time so far removed from ours that it might as well be a different world. And truly, it was a different world. Without the instant, worldwide communication, the pre-Twitter, pre-YouTube word was more insular.

Safer? I don’t know. After all, the Cuban Missile Crisis showed how a little Twitter can go a long way — or at least a direct line of communication between mutually powerful countries.

Bottom line, there was less — of everything. Somehow, that seems comforting.

Looking at these pictures, I regret I didn’t take the whole bunch out to the parking lot, lie them on the ground, and very carefully photograph them. After all, the pictures become fewer and fewer, as if somehow trying to pay tribute to the frugality of the times they capture.