Slim Memories

This evening at 8:30 I started sorting through a large box of slides from my mother's house.  The house had a devastating fire in 2004 and the slides were cleaned, but not sorted. My Dad took a lot of photos, all on slide film. I looked through about 750 slides tonight.  I have at least three hundred more in carousels  and probably more.  I also have my old artwork slides - slides!

I can send them out to be converted for a fee or buy a scanner do them myself. I do not want to do them myself, but I fear mailing them into oblivion in good faith that I will in fact, receive digital images in return. Eventually, Like Lady Macbeth, I shall "screw my courage to the sticking place..." and get the task accomplished. It has only been ten years.

In the box I found images of my nursery school 'graduation' celebration, my brother's field day in first grade, a photo of my grandfather with dark hair and one of him with his best friend Mr. Himmonocis.  Mr. H. was a delightful man; he was large and fat and he liked to laugh.  He owned a button factory and made a fortune. I still have a cloth bag full of buttons from his factory.  They are not fancy, but I love to put my hand inside the bag and let the buttons run through my fingers.  Plastic was expensive in Greece in 1961 so these buttons are not plastic.  I assume they are bone, or wood, or stone. What ever they are made of, they feel wonderful in their cotton hammock and they bring back memories of two outstanding men laughing comfortably.  I never understood the joke, as they spoke in Greek, but it made me feel warm and happy anyway.   Mr. H. spoke English, but Papoo, my grandfather, did not, nor do I speak Greek.  I spoke buttons.

There were also slides of dreams and scraggly Christmas trees, a house being built, me in Danskins when they were brand new as regular clothing rather than  dancing attire.  Motels, mountains, seas and a mother who when we went fishing wore a work dress with an accordion skirt - really (that was Mom) are all in little boxes of film. .

There are several photos, for the insurance company of our shattered sliding glass door.  It was 1965 and safety glass had not been invented, so the glass hung in the frame like giant sharks' teeth.  I was outside during my brother's eighth birthday party when Freddie came running through the glass shouting "Geronimo!" He just didn't see it; it was clean.  I saw the whole thing;  like something out of a movie.  There was silence after the initial disaster, for a moment, and then the delightful noise of Freddie screaming; kids who are really hurt do not scream.  He got 37 stitches on his elbow, period.  We were all so lucky he was running, the glass exploded outward instead of falling on him.  When my mother called his, Freddie's mother said immediately, before my mother had told her what had happened - "which hospital are you taking him to?"  Wish we had known that before we invited Freddie; or at least before we cleaned the glass door.  I ran into Freddie one night at Jim's Steak's, in the 1980's, I wondered if he thought about that afternoon often.

It is amazing how many memories are stored in the surface of one little slide.