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Shawn Colvin - "The Facts About Jimmy"
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Now Tweeting
- Melanie
We went over my parents' for dinner last night. I got to do a load of laundry & pick up some random, mostly useless junk mail. But the main attraction were the old home movies. Mom finally had them put on video before they disintegrated in the can.
It was really interesting.
They stretched from my uncle's bar mitzvah (circa 1944) through about 1971. My parents' wedding and honeymoon, my great aunt and uncle's cabana in Long Beach, my mother's middle school graduation and Sweet 16, her childhood in the Bronx and Brooklyn, Cape Cod, Atlantic City, family birthdays, me and my first cousins as children....
So many of my relatives are dead now. To see them young was so strange. My grandparents, my great aunts and uncles.... My uncle, my mother's older brother, died at 43. As a young man he looked kind of like a Jewish Lee Harvey Oswald. We haven't spoken to my aunt and his children for many years.
My mother as a young woman, mugging for the camera, posing, pouting. She said a friend of hers once told her she would drown in the rain from walking around with her nose in the air all the time - "I was a snob." Her friends all seemed to be named Sandra or Sylvia - those names no-one uses today.
My grandmother, always impeccably dressed - "She always made sure she freshened up before my father got home from work." She's sitting on a swing in a public park in a navy dress with a pink cowl collar, pink gloves and hat.
My dad, skinny, with a full head of hair, plunging into the surf at Miami Beach. His herky-jerky camera work. The jittering picture calms down. Mom: "I must have had the camera by then." My grandfather was an electronic buff who taught my mom all about stereos & cameras.
My father's father dancing with my grandmother at the wedding. His hand square in the middle of her back, the same grip of iron I felt dancing with my dad at my wedding.
Me at about age three, my hair in a little bob, singer's chipmunk cheeks even then, dancing and singing - "You were always like that! You would never sit still."
I remember some of the stories my mother used to tell of her childhood, but as the years go by more and more seem to slip away. Even memories of my childhood are becoming more vague.
At least I'll have this time capsule, someday when all these people are gone.
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a very fine cat indeed - Friday, Jan. 17, 2014
happy new year! - Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013
this is where i am - Saturday, Jun. 30, 2012
this is how it is - Friday, Feb. 24, 2012
a very late last year's wrap-up - Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012
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