Out of the Past

While going through the family photos to select shots that needed to be incorporated into the home movies, I found this picture of my Grandpa Claude -- and my mother, when she was a toddler.

I'd never seen it before, and I think it's just smashing. It really shows Grandpa's spirit and personality -- and Mom, well she seems never to have changed in some ways. She loved toys and teddy bears to her dying day.

I can't use this shot in the home movies, because it falls well outside the time period that they cover, but you can bet I'll include it in the slideshow that I'm planning as an "extra feature" for the DVD.

I'm guessing that I scanned another hundred and fifty pictures today, and I've only just begun working on their restoration. It's kind of tedious work, and it's getting more emotional, too, because we're getting up to our earliest days at the farm in Albion.

In those days the house was bright and attractive and open. The plaster was clean and solid; it was a house meant for entertaining and my folks did a lot of that. By the End Days, the house had transformed into a deeply eccentric folly, shot through with cracks -- a funhouse, all right, but one with a distinct Gothic side, a shadow behind all the happy faces that stared out of every available space.

That world isn't covered in the Home Movies either, but somehow I feel that I must give it a nod. I'm not sure yet exactly how I'm going to end the new version of the movies, but I've been working hard all through the recut to give it the shape of a story with a beginning, middle and end. It seems to me that I have to at least indicate the shape of things to come, to at least point at the way it ended. I don't want it to be maudlin, but there needs to be some sense of the damage that time and trouble inflicts on us all.

-- Freder.