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Friday, December 6, 2019

Holidays are a mixed picture


Albert John Blasi lifts his daughter Babs and me a long time ago.

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
                                                                        – Karl Lagerfeld

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
                                                                               – Joan Miro

AUBURN, Maine — I took a sentimental and pictorial journey through the past 30 years of my life.

The pilgrimage began after I started poring over worn-out photo albums over the past five months. I viewed hundreds of vintage pictures during an odyssey filled with tears, laughter and revelations of an era where over a dozen Italian relatives lived on one block.

This Italian enclave endured for decades before families starting spreading out across the nation. I miss the food, home-made wine and the company of my relatives, who made each Christmas Eve a night to remember in Revere, Mass.

There was no Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter, which I now look upon as a blessing since I discovered life was pretty damn good without social media. I can't shake those wonderful moments, but memories also trigger a daily dose of longing — especially during the holidays. 

Closure is nonsense for those of us with common sense.

Way back when

It was hand-to-hand combat when discussing politics in the backyard of my grandfather’s home, which was right next door to our house. Gatherings were huge, the booze sometimes ran like water, and voices grew louder as grown-ups sparred with each other over sports, weather and politics on hot summer evenings. My favorite argument occurred one evening when my dad admonished adults that the Beatles were partially responsible eroding society in America. 

My father was young and already set in his ways, but I thought the four mop-tops — Paul, Ringo, George and John —were a smash and could do no wrong in the world of Rock and Roll. The British Invasion was a hit as bands like The Who and Rolling Stones took Americans out for a walk with their innovative sounds.

An obsession begins

For five years, over a half dozen of my mom’s photo albums sat buried under stuff in a packed closet. I sifted through plastic bags filled with old pictures and then inserted them into new albums.

I neglected the photos after my father passed away, and the four of us had the unenviable, melancholic task of cleaning out our parents’ home, which, sadly, was sold in 2015.

Being a witness to Alzheimer’s diabolical and unrelenting progression knocked the life out my soul. Perusing through those old photo albums became unbearable for me after we buried four immediate family members in four years.  

But the passing of time and a year’s worth of grief counseling gave me the courage to extricate those boxes filled with my past and examine over 500 photos, including some that were nearly 70 years old —without slipping into a mind-numbing depression.

Those pictures are slowly fading away just like aunts and uncles who are no longer with us. I knew these photos needed rescuing and tender, loving care.

A notion is born

Before I sifted through this jumble of photographs, I decided to give my three sisters hundreds of never-seen-before pictures of their children that we had taken for over the past two decades. I estimate that I have 3,000 pictures locked up in 70 albums that are stored upright on large, home-made Spruce book shelves. I needed to make room for more recent photos, and I eventually tossed out 500 after they were deemed as poor quality.

So I carefully dug through each book and extracted pictures of my sisters’ children.

I finished the project in two months, but I was on a tear and I set my sights on those priceless, abandoned photos in the back of the closet, knowing time is now at a premium in our lives. Each grizzled photo album featured pictures of my grandparents at a backyard barbecue, trips to Pennsylvania, Niagara Falls, Washington D.C. and visits to New England cemeteries to find lost relatives on my mother’s side of the family.

Before I began, I needed to delicately remove each photo from the wax paper that held them there for over four decades. Peeling away each photo was an arduous task, but I discovered a method to speed up the process on the Internet. Heating an iron-made spatula with a blow dryer allows the spatula to cut through the wax without damaging the photo.

There are 513 photos that needed to be scanned and developed so someday they will take the place of the originals. Let’s hope they come out OK after some serious enhancing on my computer.

I needed to complete this project, which became an unusual obsession for me, and now this endeavor has taken me to the holidays.

After all, T’s the season to speak of loved ones in the past tense as we all fend off those winter blues in New England.

Darkness comes quick in the hinterlands, and with the early winter twilight, depression is at its mightiest as it makes the rounds, jabbing away at your fragile soul like a feisty pugilist looking for an opportunity to land a devastating right hook.

Thanksgiving and Christmas double team and overwhelm us with the past. The Ghost of Christmas Past slips back into our deepest recesses, resurrecting fond memories.

So it is easy to lament the passing of time in the cold dark of winter and wishing you could have one more conversation with your parents. But you realize that people drift away like the melting spring snow and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

Picture this

I do a majority of my work as a sportswriter and photographer at home. One of my three bedrooms serves as an office and a pictorial history of my family fills the walls. There are at least 50 photographs of lives well lived that stare back at me.

This cavalcade of enlarged photographs is like taking H.G. Wells’ time machine out for a spin every day.

I look at them when I pause to come up with another original sentence or touch up an action shot. Sometimes, I wander off in the past for a few minutes before I return to the blank page.

It is a privilege to know where I come from, but there are people who have never been surrounded by loving and kind relatives and friends like I have. Few have lived in a neighborhood with relatives occupying one street.

That is why these old, knocked-around photos are important to all our children and the generations to come in our family tree.

The passing of time has a way of sorting out priorities in life — and it explains why those endearing photographs deserved my attention and soothed my longing for those I loved and lost over the decades.























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Out and about

Take a walk on the wild side around New England's outdoors. Come walk with my son and I as we explore state parks, historic sites, and creepy cemeteries. This is the good stuff in life, and there is nothing worth watching on television, anyway. Join us as we take advantage of Maine's beaches and pristine forests. In between our sojourns through the Pine Tree State, look for political insight and a few well-written opinion pieces as well.