For Father's Day, my wife gave me a photo album of pictures she came across a day or two before, she said in a K-Mart photo envelope. They must have been randomly put there for safekeeping or something, and it must have been thirty or even forty years ago, maybe even fifty years ago, since we hadn't used K-Mart photo processing any later than the early '70s.
These pictures were far older than that.
The oldest one probably dates to 1910 or so and I think it is a picture of Mamie or Maggie, the maid/nanny in my grandfather's house in Iowa. There's another old one of what looks like a town somewhere in the Midwest or West. Not any place in Iowa I'm familiar with. Based on a car in the picture, it was taken in the 1930's or '40s.
Then there are a lot of pictures of me taken between the ages of a few months to 16 or 17. There are some of my nephew from the time he was a few months old to the age four or five. One of my sister a year after my nephew's birth.
There are some pictures of household pets from the 1950s and 60s. I remember the dogs' names but not the cats.
Some pictures of my mother in the 1950s and '60s.
And some Polaroids of a dog and a shopping center at Christmas time from the 1960s.
Some came as a shock because I don't remember ever seeing them before.
I would say with some confidence that I haven't seen any of them in fifty years, and some I may never have seen before though I probably did and forgot.
I've spent some time putting them in more or less chronological order and making notes about what/who they are pictures of. But there are some I have no idea of. Or only the vaguest idea.
It's fascinating and a little creepy.
