A Moment in Time

Two weeks ago I returned from my brother’s home in South Carolina with the family slides - missing for possibly fifteen years and only recently found to be stored in box of my nephew’s stuff. I still have not managed to put them in some order and get them transferred to digital disc. Some of them are faded or turned a reddish hue that suggests long ago times.

I don’t even own a projector so I randomly draw one from the small green box and hold it up to a spotlight. There, magically before my eyes, is a scene at the dining room table in the house I grew up in. My mother sits at the center, looking almost girlish in her thirty-something style. She looks so damn young! At the left her sister Marlene sits with a casually raised arm holding a cigarette. Everyone smoked then.

My grandpa Saul stands behind them in the living room casually listening in on the conversation. His easy and elegant style is drawn from a time before my generation changed all the rules about casual dress. Amazingly, I have to imagine that he must have been then about the age that I am now. I don’t know the date of this photograph.

To the right my Great-grandma Schneider holds court, making her points more strident by that expressive wave of her arms. I can hear her thick Polish accent and, more likely than not, an account of something with which she disapproves.

A moment in time.