Vergil’s Coffee

She’s reminded me to put the thing away, but for some reason, I simply have not until last night. The photo album had taken up residence under the family room table for about 2 months ago when I dug the thing out of the upstairs “yarn” room (it’s the place where Lori keeps…well, her yarn). And it’s this photo album that I’ve attached a few meanings to and it’s my portal to a time of a younger me—another time, another place, another person. And I took care, when I put my photos in it, to label each page and create a table of contents.

Seems that I did more looking at others and pretty mountains than living an exciting life.

At least, that’s what I get from thumbing through the album last night before Lori’s encouragement to put it away in the yarn room.

We were talking today in 5^th hour about LPs and how much music you could fit on the things (I think the point was about the limitations of time on music as restricted by the then current technology). To my best guess, I think we came up with approximately 30 minutes per side.

I’m thinking both of these ways of capturing moments are really old school: photos printed on paper and music engraved on vinyl 12 inch disks. Some people still prefer each of these medium for the archiving of memory and song and I’m thinking I’m happy to reduce the clutter, but there’s something about being subject to someone else’s editorial decisions.

For some reason, my photo album (more scrapbook/yearbook) lacks a chronological order and at times I question the arrangement of the photos. I used a lot of white space because, well, I wanted to fill up the entire book. But the book serves its purpose: to evoke memory of a more innocent time., or, possibly more accurately, a time when I think things were just easier. I take lots of pictures of nature stuff (especially the mountains of Yosemite which I can ot spell correctly). There are pictures of friends doing stuff and other shots of the same people posing. There are only two pictures of me: one of an out-of-focused blond-haired 12-year-old in front of some falls in Northern California on our sixth grade outdoor education trip wearing a navy blue sweatshirt. The hood is down and I have a Star Wars baseball cap on and I have my hands in the front pockets. Janet Burkhart took the picture and apparently couldn’t handle my Pentax K1000 slr. Focus is also an issue when we’re on a music tour during the summer of 1982. Christina is cutting my hair by the ocean and Russ or Ryan simply couldn’t manually keep things sharp.

I liked my Pentax K1000: you controlled the focus, you controlled the light, you controlled the picture and with that control, I messed up many a picture on many rolls of film that we not realized until a week or two after dropping the film to be processed.

With that camera, as seen in the photo album, I captured a 7^th grade soccer game and basketball game. Which is a bit odd because I was an active player in both those games. I guess it never crossed my mind if I were on the team and was to play that I probably shouldn’t be taking pictures of the game with my Pentax K1000 with my variety of lenses.

Also, I captured many people whom I’ve heard stories about since graduation. One person is apparently bi-polar, another is gay, someone else has been divorced twice and yet another a corporate lawyer for IBM. I can not verify any of these claims. All I have are the photos in this album and how I remember each of those folks in the context of my album. For me, I remember those people as still being 16 years old and laying down on the carpet on a church floor after a long drive to Middletown, California.

I did put the album in the yarn room, a day or two after the encouragements to do so earlier– I think I just placed it on the first non-cluttered horizontal surface—possible on the bookshelf to the left of the room. I like the yarn room, but realize that I don’t know yarn like Lori does. To me, yarn is color and texture in the chocolate brown room upstairs; to her, it is the stuff to create pragmatic things—usable color and texture within a sock or sweater or scarf. She is patient with her yarn and isn’t afraid to tear out an entire hour’s work if the pattern has strayed. I know that she doesn’t enjoy ripping out all of that work, but she deems it necessary to make the thing useful. ‘m not sure I could do that with the color and texture of my past as seen in my photo album.

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